Over the weekend I woke up at 3am and had an idea for a package. Inspired by the new Tetris Dashboard, I thought it would be cool to have a hidden dashboard that is only accessible via some key presses, to be more precise, old school Konami key pressed - up, up, down, down, left, right.
I went back to sleep but woke up again on Sunday morning at about 8am and got straight on to my laptop.
Using the opinionated package starter and upgrading that to use Umbraco 17, I was ready to go. I had a dashboard already created for me so all I had to do was hide it.
When I got the dashboard showing it was time to hide it and see if I could get it to reappear with some keystrokes. To my surprise it was possible and I could display the dashboard.
That was fun but like all good cheat codes, I wanted to hide an Easter Egg in the package, so with a quick chat with CoPilot I hide a classic arcade game within the dashboard. You can now play Pac-man within the backoffice of Umbraco. Wakka-wakka.
But to make this package actually useful to others, I made it so you can actually hide your own packages within the hidden dashboard, you can also remove the pac-man game if you want. This is all possible via appsettings and a bit more code. Everything is documented in my github repo.
Github: OwainWilliams/OC.HiddenDashboard
Nuget: NuGet Gallery | OC.HiddenDashboard 1.1.0
It was a lot of fun building this and I hope you enjoy it.
UPDATE 16/12/2025
I've now made the secret code configurable via AppSettings so you can set your own secret code to give accesso to the hidden dashboard.
{
"OC.HiddenDashboard": {
"KeySequence": ["ArrowUp", "ArrowUp", "ArrowDown", "ArrowDown", "ArrowLeft", "ArrowRight"]
}
}
