Another alternative admin

[Ivan Gretsky]

Good day, everyone!

I am having this idea for quite some time already and want to discuss if it is even possible. I really like using ProcessWire admin for site managing purposes. Some of my clients are also using PW admin interface. Recently I am meeting more demand to create role-based access with complex restrictions. I tried to modify the built-in admin interface for some roles, managed to build quite a different user experience for them. But It was not such an easy thing to do. More to that, my own admin interface got cluttered with the admin pages that were only intended for some other roles. And there is no single place for template permissions management to easy and quickly make things work as you expect.

So the idea is to try to go another way. Not to adjust the common admin application, but to have another one. I am not talking about building a front-end admin, but about having another admin area with ProcessModule-based pages, but with a different set of them. For most cases quite a limited set of them.

I do not know where to start. I can only imagine that some things are hard-coded, so that can be a problem. But still, what do you think about it?

[renobird]

I'm not entirely sure I follow what you are after. Are you looking to create a sub-set of the admin and restrict particular users to just those pages?
If so, I can give you some pointers. 

[Ivan Gretsky]

That is what the initial intention is. I will appreciate you giving me any piece of advice on that.

And if there is something to be said on question of alternative admin under different root, that will still be interesting.

[szabesz]

@Ivan Gretsky If I understand you correctly, you are looking for a way to build (as easily as possible, of course...) a "basic", stripped down admin area, as opposed to trying to apply restrictions to the built in one, right? Without knowing too much about PW's inner workings, I do not think it is something that is supported by the core as such, otherwise we should have already found hints on such features. That is why @renobird is talking about "Are you looking to create a sub-set of the admin and restrict particular users to just those pages?", I suppose.

[Ivan Gretsky]

13 minutes ago, szabesz said:

I do not think it is something that is supported by the core as such, otherwise we should have already found hints on such features.

Thanks for participation, @szabesz. But I have read several times about admin being "just another application on top of PW framework" and "just a branch of a site tree". Everything happen the first time sometimes, so it just might be the time to discover another trick .

But I would  be happy to find out as much as possible about what @renobird was talking about too.

[LostKobrakai]

You could try to clone the admin template, create a new tree branch with it and duplicate site/template/admin.php to fit the name of your new template. I would just expect, that the admin parent (id=2) and the template name are often used in modules, so this might create some problems.

[mr-fan]

If your problems belong only to some Admin pages like the pagetree you could even change the used Process for that Adminpages...for example you could replace the ProcessPageTree with ProcessLister and there is no more pagetree but a full configurable Lister running....just a hint.

More details of usecases or problems would be helpfull....

[renobird]

Ivan,

Can you give us a simple walk through of what you are after? For instance, describe what a user with restricted access might be able to see when they login.