"Admin" app --- lightweight, design principles, UI/UX, general discussion...

dalecosp

We have an app I'd like to be able to move ... but it's tied very tightly down to a couple things ... one is the login system and the other the "admin control panel" ... there might be a few other things that I've not thought of yet.

A login system is a large enough project for one guy, but not at all insurmountable ... the admin control panel, on the other hand, has to address any of a couple hundred data items in varying general categories: user management, seller management, product management, email settings, site configuration variables, etc.

I really feel a "one page app" would be great, but it seems like there's too much content. The amount of work to develop classes, AJAX servers, and especially the front-end UI/JavaScript seems rather daunting.

What's your experience?

I'd really like it to be lightweight and preferably not something I'd have to be updating continuously (it's going to be constrained to a rather old version of PHP until the rest of the work can be done and gets all ported to a new server environment ).

So, please talk me out of rolling my own, haha!

NogDog

Just off the top of my head -- not something I've tried -- it might be fairly easy to create a separate admin application on Laravel, using scaffolding to quickly create all your models, and then one of the existing application manager packages (or extensions, or whatever they're called) to get the admin interface up and running. https://www.google.com/search?q=laravel+admin+scaffold

That assumes that everything you'd want to administer is ultimately database-driven? (Or at least mostly -- you could always add another controller/view for something that isn't)

dalecosp

NogDog wrote:
Laravel

That might be great experience for me. Of course, then we have to install and maintain Laravel. How big a deal is that? How often do I have to update it?
How stable is it generally? Are they gonna fork a commercial version and leave us hanging for updates?

Oh, and are you guys gonna hold my hand while I screw around with it for a month or two? 😃 😃

I guess I'm kind of kidding there ... but looking around at stuff---no composer, no artisan here. :eek: Can you do this sort of work in a newer setting and move it to our ancient PHP 5.2 box ... and more importantly, I suppose, once there, will it work?

NogDog

I suspect any reasonably current version of Laravel would want at least 5.6 or so of PHP? If you're stuck with 5.2 (thought it was bad that I'm stuck with 5.3 for an app), you could in theory put the Laravel app on another server -- or even a Docker container (just to add more to the to-learn list!) -- as long as it can still talk to the DB server.

But yeah, if you're stuck with that old version and want to work within it, Laravel is probably not the solution. 🙁

dalecosp

I'm actually trying to get AWAY from that, but I have to make it work either before the move, or concurrent with it ... (and there's NO sandbox [another reason I want to move] ... so I dunno how I'm going to know it will work unless I go ahead and implement it. I do have 5.6.30 running on a 'sister' box that runs some of our other projects ...?)

dalecosp

Here's a big question ... does Laravel "expect" specific things like column and tables names in the DB schema?