Drupal best practises for custom admin section

Question

Is this a common task in your Drupal work when you're asked to create a custom admin section in Drupal for your content?

For instance, you have a few content types and user wants not only to view them, but to search using different filters, to add new items - all inside the same admin subsection.

In essense, this is classic search/grid/record screen/pages and while in typical Drupal distribution content management screents are kind of scattered around, I am talking about more organized spage, e.g. in which Grid (View) also has "Add new" link and you don't have to scroll to "Create content" menu which relates to a different section.

What is your experience and opinion in this relation?

Answer 1

I'm actually working on something like this right now where I work. We've built a custom module to solve Drupal's biggest problem of having unorganized content by organizing it in a nice tree structure. What we've decided to do is go ahead and create a whole new section within the admin just for managing content through this module (it contains a lot more functionality than just a tree structure). There were two big deciding factors when deciding to do this.

1. We knew we weren't going to be releasing this module so we didn't need to worry about integration with other modules because any such integration would be done by us.
2. The non-technical staff that this was presented to preferred this method over having several different admin pages with different pieces of functionality on each one, despite all the functionality being related. They viewed at as simply being easier to use.

The point behind my explanation is this: if it makes sense in your situation, then I'd say make either a new section or a new page with several tabs on it. There's a lot of deciding factors to consider:

• Do I (or my) clients like the Drupal admin as is?
• Do I need to worry about integration with third party modules?
• Is time of the essence (this one is a big one)?
• How extensible do I need the new admin page(s) to be?
• Is upgrading to the newest version of Drupal of big importance (from 5 to 6 and later from 6 to 7 and so on)?

Many non-developers I've talked to abhor the Drupal admin and most content editors I've talked to or worked with prefer having a single admin page they can go to to manage all of their content. As a result, our setup is well received by our clients even though some within the Drupal community may not agree with it.

Answer 2

Another option - much easier to deliver - would be to create a new menu only visible to the administrators - and dependent on the content displayed - with links to the pages for common tasks. Particular views, for example, or to add new content of the currently displayed type, etc.

Answer 3

you can use views_bulk_operation module to show content (or users) to execute (batch) operations on them. in this way you get a sortable grid with search capabilities (exposed filters), pagination and the possibility to execute custom bulk actions. from here it's easy to add a link "create new" in the view footer. furthermore, you can use link as "local tasks" to organize views in tabs.

usually i use simplemenu for the admin backend and i hide the navigation menu in the sidebar for all but administrators.