Building Admin Pages for Your Site
Posted: Sat Mar 01, 2008 12:30 am
I've been doing PHP web apps now for awhile for my international clients. However, I'm feeling like I'm still too slow. I'm hung up doing admin interfaces all the time for public websites I bring up for my clients. Has anyone come up with a generic admin framework interface, perhaps with a GUI or without, that is very suitable, easy to learn and customize? For instance, I can't just provide a reference table editor, because there are business rules that must be fired and that could mean multiple reference tables must be edited. As well, admins want to search reference and main task tables by certain criteria, and then I need to provide paginated results.
Let me be more concrete. Let's say I have a webmaster admin system for a Yellow Pages-style directory website for a particular niche market. My client, the webmaster who has no programming skills, wants an admin system for the reference tables and the main task tables. The main task tables would be things like the queue tables for the directory, such as listed items, unlisted items, and a moderation queue for added or edited listings. This is where the meat and potatoes is for the application. As for the reference tables, these are things that are usually smaller tables addressed by foreign keys, such as users, groups, categories, payment methods, and so on. Anyway, the admin system needs to let one add, search/edit, search/remove and/or search/disable, purge disabled items, and do it for each reference table and each main task table, as well as perhaps move records from one table to another (like queue tables).
For now, I'm frustrated because I have to draw the admin menu systems by hand, the admin forms by hand, the search/lookup mechanism by hand, and so on, and although I can cut and paste between some pages, every page seems to need a special customization here or there because of a business rule.
I also didn't want to waste a lot of time on making paginated search for records, so for now I'm using AJAX on about 2-3 main fields for a reference or main task table, and because I could return thousands and thousands upon records, I use a mechanism of a Starts With... field such as "Starts With Aa - Ai" and when that is selected, it only shows me choices for that field which are applicable. Then, I choose one of those choices and the form populates with data for just one record.
It would be great if I could get used to a framework that I simply point to tables, choose certain options about those tables and the style of admin interface, choose generate, and it builds the main admin menu system and all the forms and receiving pages for each admin menu item, along with all working DB code. At that point, I just customize for the extra business rules.
P.S. I hope this is the right forum for this. I figured I needed to discuss something higher level than, let's say, how to fix a broken page, and that this was about theory, not really about actual coding.
Let me be more concrete. Let's say I have a webmaster admin system for a Yellow Pages-style directory website for a particular niche market. My client, the webmaster who has no programming skills, wants an admin system for the reference tables and the main task tables. The main task tables would be things like the queue tables for the directory, such as listed items, unlisted items, and a moderation queue for added or edited listings. This is where the meat and potatoes is for the application. As for the reference tables, these are things that are usually smaller tables addressed by foreign keys, such as users, groups, categories, payment methods, and so on. Anyway, the admin system needs to let one add, search/edit, search/remove and/or search/disable, purge disabled items, and do it for each reference table and each main task table, as well as perhaps move records from one table to another (like queue tables).
For now, I'm frustrated because I have to draw the admin menu systems by hand, the admin forms by hand, the search/lookup mechanism by hand, and so on, and although I can cut and paste between some pages, every page seems to need a special customization here or there because of a business rule.
I also didn't want to waste a lot of time on making paginated search for records, so for now I'm using AJAX on about 2-3 main fields for a reference or main task table, and because I could return thousands and thousands upon records, I use a mechanism of a Starts With... field such as "Starts With Aa - Ai" and when that is selected, it only shows me choices for that field which are applicable. Then, I choose one of those choices and the form populates with data for just one record.
It would be great if I could get used to a framework that I simply point to tables, choose certain options about those tables and the style of admin interface, choose generate, and it builds the main admin menu system and all the forms and receiving pages for each admin menu item, along with all working DB code. At that point, I just customize for the extra business rules.
P.S. I hope this is the right forum for this. I figured I needed to discuss something higher level than, let's say, how to fix a broken page, and that this was about theory, not really about actual coding.