best practice to create an Admin section in a ZF based application

Question

In every large application there is an ADMIN section.
In such cases, when not using ZF, I usually put all the admin stuff in a separate directory with extra security measures (like adding .htaccess based authentication and/or a second login etc). This also makes it pretty obvious in the file tree what file is what.

How can I achieve the same design in ZF? Or are there any best practices to create an admin section?
Should I do it in the router level (if there is "admin" in the url, then I use a different index.php/ bootstrap file....)
I guess the simplest was just using a controller for all the admin stuff, but I have too much of that. So I have several admin controllers side by side with the regular app controllers. It makes a mess in my controllers directory - which controller is admin and which is not?

Answer 1

I generally create a separate "application" folder - complete with its own controller and view directory as well as a public directory for static content - for the entire administration system. The Administration usually has different requirements for key things such as access management, and might differ from the actual application in numerous other ways. Therefore I think it's a good idea to separate the source code entirely. Some of the source code can still be common, though. Examples include library folders and database models.

This approach also gives you larger flexibility when deciding where the admin utility should be available. You could use the apache alias directice to put it in a sub directory on the same domain, or put it on a separate vhost. It's all up to you.

Answer 2

You should check out using modules with ZF. You can have a default module to contain non-admin stuff, and an admin module to contain everything administrative. Using a default module will not change your current URLs and the admin module URLs will look like server.com/admin/controllername/actionname/params. This will solve your controllers all being in the same place and getting cluttered. Also, you can subclass Zend_Controller_Action and make a Master_Controller in your models to keep shared functionality. Then just make an Admin_Controller that extends the master controller for shared administrative functionality and have every controller in your admin module subclass that. You can use a similar structure to organize shared non-admin functionality in your other module(s).

Zend Framework - modular directory structure

Answer 3

I've done it as a module. In addition to the module link provided by Brett Bender see section 12.3.2.2 in the link I provided.