Simple custom admin page for online store

[Ovi]

Hello,

I'm going to build an online store using Processwire and FoxyCart.

The products will most likely appear in multiple categories, so to prevent duplicate content problems as well as madness when managing the products in the back-end, all the products will appear under one parent: "Products" with categories pages pulling children from that parent and filtering them according to a category field.

My problem is that i need an easy way for the client to view the products in the backend, since the normal page tree doesn't work that well for this purpose (it would just be a very long list of product names...) 

So i'm thinking of a "Products" page in the admin section that would allow the client to search / filter the products based on certain criteria like category, tags, number of ratings, etc.

I know how i would do this in the front end, but what's the easiest way of achieving it in the back-end?

I don't have any experience with building modules forProcesswire but i know my way around simple to medium PHP.

Should i try and use Soma's jquery data table module? https://github.com/somatonic/DataTable

Or should i try using the hack described here: http://processwire.com/talk/topic/2386-easy-way-of-creating-custom-admin-pages/

Or is it better if i start a module from scratch to learn the ropes?

Any advice is welcome! Thanks!

[apeisa]

Try processhello module by Ryan and see how simple the custom admin pages are.

[Soma]

My DataTable process module would be a good place to start. I've shared it mostly for others to use as a base. It's not a finished complete product, but more of a proof of concept. Since the needs are always different it's hard to make such a module work for all cases.

I'm using a modified version on a online shop with hundreds of products. It's easy to change what cols are output and adding filtering by templates or categories. 

If you are comfortable a little with php and js you'll figure it out, or just ask away in the forums if you need help.

[MatthewSchenker]

Greetings,

This kind of need arises often, and one solution is to build a data table from your ProcssWire material, and add user access controls. Using JQuery DataTables, this is fairly easy.

I posted a working example: http://processwire.com/talk/topic/3128-need-guidance-for-ui-modules-sortable-data/?p=31412

Starting from that base, you can build many ways to arrange, filter, and style the data. It can form the base of an admin panel.

ProcessWire makes it really easy and clean to implement this kind of thing. Let me know if you need more specific information.

Thanks,

Matthew