This weekend I have been working on a new interface for my Admin Panel. Whilst my current look is quite nice, it's also growing to become rather unweildy. Horizontal Navigation only goes so far before things get a little bit out of control after all:

Whilst it deals with a huge navigation menu a lot better than I had anticipated, it is growing increasingly unwieldy and frustrating to make use of. The idea behind both the current version and the new version is that it should be easy to use and somewhat intuitive in terms of usage. The current version is beginning to show some flaws in that regard, it can't handle the wealth of control being put into it any more... something new is needed.

That something new comes in the form of a new layout with new functionality and a greatly streamlined set of code running it all. It's still little more than a Work in Progress in terms of the majority of functions, but I have it already set up to allow me to add, edit and delete users as well as providing almost complete control over the blog posts displayed on the site. Still a long way to go in terms of functionality, but it currently looks like this:

There are quite a few changes in comparison to the original. There's a new breadcrumb navigation that lets you know where in the site are that will, eventually, allow you to click back through each aspect of the admin panel, even back to the main site itself. There is still a horizontal navigation menu, which I intend to use to display important links which is, as yet, undeveloped. The main body of the navigation is now on the left hand side and bundled into categories so that you only see the links you need to see, plus a selection of important links that will always be visible. The main body of the site is still the same, though the look and feel of it has been enhanced greatly to enhance both the looks and, more importantly, the usability of the sections.

The footer bar will contain some statistics about the site, such as number of viewable posts, number of comments made, as well as details on the currently signed in user. It will probably also contain details about the version of the admin panel. This will be the third incarnation of my admin panel. Boy has it developed a lot from it's XML driven roots.

Posted by Wulf on May 10, 2009, 3:10 pm