About a year ago I blogged about how you can add your own links to the ColdFusion Administrator. While this isn't something you often need to do - it is handy for integrating third party applications into the Administrator. (Spoolmail and Flogr are two examples of this.)

Jason Delmore of Adobe let me in on a new update to this. While the old extensionscustom.cfm feature still works in ColdFusion 8, there is a new file you can use named custommenu.xml. It exists right now in your CFIDE/Administrator folder. This file lets you add both new sections and links to the Administrator. (The extensionscustom.cfm file only lets you add links to a 'Custom Extensions' node.)

So while I can't see using this terribly often, it is nice to see. One idea for how to use it: Currently to get to the Service Monitor, you click a link in the left hand menu and then click a button. You could put a direct link in the left hand menu and skip one button push. Ok, so it isn't a huge improvement, but maybe others will have more ideas.