A little more than six months ago I showed you guys the back end, or administration side of my site. This tool or Administration Panel is where I put together my site. It's where I moderate my visitors' comments, create and edit my articles, create and edit site pages, and edit site or personal settings. You can check out the older preview here and laugh at it's horrible design and amateurish features. I know I do.

Well, over these past six months my site has grown in popularity as well as my coding ability. Lots of things had to be changed or added in order for me to properly administer my site. So I thought I'd show you guys some of my new features and changes that I've implemented in the Administration Panel. One thing that still eludes me is a good name for it, so in the time being I've just been calling it the NV Administration Panel or NVAP (envy app) for short. Lame, I know, but it's probably the one thing I've put the least amount of time into.

*Note: The images below only show a part of the screen shot. Click on the image to see the entire screen shot and in a bigger version.

The first thing we come across is your basic Login page. The first thing you'll notice is a graphics change between the older NVAP and newer one. The newer one is a lot more sleek and just plain nicer looking with some gradients, button styles, and logo. Like I said, this is just a basic login page; enter your user name and password and click Login. It's as simple as that.

Once you successfully login you're treated to my favorite and ever evolving page, the Dashboard. The Dashboard does what any dashboard does - it displays all your important site stats along with quick access to certain areas and tools. As you can see in the full screen shot, the Dashboard displays who I'm logged in as, when I last logged in, my personal info (my private messages, my articles, and my comments) and site stats (all articles, comments, people online, and database stats). And in case you were wondering, yes I stole those icons for the time being.

Some new things I just recently added to the Dashboard include quick links and tools where I can quickly access common areas and tools of the NVAP. I've also decided to display site and server information like the NVAP version that's running as well as the versions of PHP and MySQL that the server is running. You'll also notice it displays your current date and time as well as the server's (in my case the server and I are in the same timezone). And the most recent item I added to the Dashboard (and site overall) is site logging. From here I can see the latest 5 action logs that occurred on my site as well as the newest comments.

In my last preview I briefly talked about the ability to add and manage multiple site users or members. Well, now I've added a way to manage their permissions as well with Access Groups. From the above full image you can see that the admin has the ability to create a group and assign individual permissions to each aspect of every area. Once the group is created, I can then assign my users to these groups to grant or limit access in certain areas.

Along with the updates to my NVAP, I've also made several big updates to the front end of the site, in particular, my site template system. From the above full screen shot you can see I now have the ability to switch between site templates, as well as editing their CSS and template files. This area is still a work in progress but one that I'm eager to finish.

One of the most important things about a database driven web site is backing up or protecting your data. There have been a few moments these past couple years where I lost data in my database. Luckily though, I made regular copies through the database front end, phpMyAdmin that I could backup from, but I wanted a way to do it through the NVAP. So I created the above database tools. The above full screen shot shows each table in my database and its information like number of rows, size, and overhead. I can then optimize or backup my database whenever I want.

At the bottom of the image you'll notice my list of previous backups where I can download the backup locally, delete it, or restore my site from it. This undoubtedly took me the longest to complete, but it was well worth the time and effort as this tool has now saved me a few times.

With the growth of visitors to my site, managing and moderating their comments has become a pain in the ass. Before I would just mesh all the comments together and order them by date descending. Well when your site gets close to reaching 1,000 comments as well as getting several dozen spam comments a day, this method no longer works. So as the above full screen shot shows, I can now sort and filter my comments as desired. I can change how many to display per page, what to order them by (author, article title, or date), and how to order them (ascending or descending). I can also filter the comments to only show approved, unapproved, or spam comments. Finally, I can search through my comments for certain names, emails, URLs, IPs, etc.

And as this last full screen shot shows, I've made some huge updates to my article creation and edit pages. The image shows certain additions to my articles where I can add article meta tags, set an expiration date of the article (in which case no one can access it anymore), allow or disallow comments, and set comments expiration (where visitors can no longer comment on the article).

The above screen also shows my article edit page without the WYSIWYG editor enabled. I'm kind of trying to figure out what I want to do in that case. Should I download and implement a free WYSIWYG editor? Or should I try to create one my own? Or should I just stick with a simple textarea field? I'm still undecided on that part.

Anyways, that's pretty much a simple preview on what I see everday while managing my site. Creating this back end has been a long and educational experience, and I don't see it being finished anytime soon. As well as the updates mentioned above, I've also done several other NV AP updates including a lot more general site settings like setting your timezone offset, your preferred date format, and whether to enable site logging or not. I've also added several anti-spam features like Akismet and/or a captcha that I can enable or disable on the fly. I've also added a plugin ability similar to Wordpress's where you can install additional plugins and use them throughout the site.

In the end, these past six months have brought a lot of changes to the NVAP and I'm excited to see what the next six months have in store. So far I'm out of ideas as to what to add next, but I'm sure more additions will come.