You need a company that understands the technology and the market. You need a company that sweats the details. We've been building custom websites and creating software solutions since 1997. You need Chronos Interactive. Visit our Portfolio at www.chronosinteractive.com
Just as every website has its own requirements and functionality, every website's administration dashboard has its own requirements and functionality. No matter how complex or how simple a website might be, the person managing the website down the road is going to need their own set of tools and user interfaces to get the job done.
On a recent project we developed a custom web-based document library on Drupal 7. The core functionality and administration, albeit straightforward for the most part, had its bottle necks. There were some unique "use-case scenarios", which threw some wrenches into the process. The basic structure of a document library consists of files and categories for those files, as well as users and groups (access levels) for the users. Managing files and their categorization or users and their group membership is easy to grasp and design functionality to accommodate. However, when you get down to certain use-case scenarios you realize that in order to provide a flexible and efficient administration capability, there will need to be functionality like what we refer to as "reverse administration."
For example, "direct administration" would consist of ascribing a category (or categories) to an individual file when you add/edit that record, or controlling which user "group" can view that file. Similarly, when adding or editing a user you can change what group access levels the user is granted. All pretty straightforward right? Well what happens when you have 1,834 users, 21 group access levels, 549 files and you add a new group access level... The problem here is that you need to open a single file to modify what group access levels can view it and to add a user to the group access level you need to modify an individual user. Well, we're certainly not going to go editing 1,834 users individually to change which ones are in the newly created group. So we need to design an administration feature that lets you "reverse administer" relationships — not only select what groups a user is apart of when editing users (so it's easy to manage as new users join the site), but also manage users in bulk when editing a group (so it's easy to manage as new groups are created).
These puzzles and their solutions are the catalyst and product of team efforts in our office. If you can, imagine a conference room with members of our team, hashing out any future issues or use-case scenarios for which we need to prepare. We'll all feel pretty good about the solutions we've divined, then inevitably someone trots out the ol' "Well, what if..(total edge scenario)..happens?", and everyone sits back with a "Hmmm..." look on their face. Fortunately for us, it's never long before someone (or several someones) leap up to the dry erase board and the pens start flying.
Just another day in the Chronos office!
Please Update Your Browser:
www.microsoft.com/Windows/internet-explorer