Create Admin Panel

[seanmayhew]

I want to create an admin panel so that the owners of the site /my client can add products and manage orders and customers and categories all the basic site maintenence things the only thing that will be unaccessable from the admin panel would be credit card and password info. What is the bast place to stick this panel? Off site on a seperate site for instance my personal site (I would rather not store their admin on my site) or their site http://www.theirsite.com/admin or outside the world viewable directory and if so how would I get them to it? Any help would be greatly appreciated

[bastien]

in its own folder and cookie the client machine...the first time you will need to email a link to your client for their machine to hit the site...then cookie the client machine...the next time the client visits the site have a small php page that checks for the existence of the cookie and redirects them to the admin page if they are a user or the main page if a guest....

don't forget to have a password login scheme to make this more secure

[coditoergosum]

I've done this same sort of thing for a few of my clients. I always make a subdomain called admin, so the url is http://admin.abc.com .... you could always just put it at abc.com/admin though. The main page is a login screen, and the whole site uses sessions for the authentication. Works very well... and I haven't had any complaints.

[AMV]

I'm working on a site with both public users and a number of different types of administrators. The site already has a general user/password login system, so the majority of what I needed was already in place. The users are already being stored in a MySQL DB, so I added a "Type" field to the User entity and used it to store the user's priviledges. When a user logs in, their priviledges are checked and the navigation menu is rendered based on these results. If the user is an admin, an extra admin button is added after the normal menu buttons. This gives admins the same clean, graphical interface as everyone else and spares them from having to remember extra URLs. Of course, it's also important that the admin pages themselves check the user type whenever they're loaded (which in my case is stored in a cookie), because the URLs themselves could still wind up in the wrong hands.

[bastien]

Originally posted by coditoergosum
I've done this same sort of thing for a few of my clients. I always make a subdomain called admin, so the url is http://admin.abc.com .... you could always just put it at abc.com/admin though. The main page is a login screen, and the whole site uses sessions for the authentication. Works very well... and I haven't had any complaints.

i can't seem to find anything on it..

[coditoergosum]

Find anything on what?

[bastien]

setting up subdomains

[coditoergosum]

Well, you have to first setup the subdomain with you registrar. I use registerfly for all of my domains, and they have an interface that makes it really easy to do so. Second, you have to setup your webserver to recognize the domain, and send you to the right place. I use virtual hosts in apache. It's pretty simple to setup, you basically just specify the hostname (subdomain.domain.tld), and the documentroot for it.

Here is a vhost example from my httpd.conf file:

<VirtualHost *>
ServerName www.gagon.net
DocumentRoot c:/apache/htdocs
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *>
ServerName brad.gagon.net
DocumentRoot c:/apache/htdocs/brad
</VirtualHost>

You also need to include this line somewhere in the httpd.conf file to get apache to use name based vhosts: NameVirtualHost *