Creating a Dashboard

In Chapters 4 and 5 , you completed most of the work needed to build a functional (if rudimentary)

eCommerce site. You created models for extracting category and product data and handling

orders. You also built controllers and views that presented users with well - organized home pages,

category pages, and product pages. You even created a shopping cart mechanism.

In this chapter, you concentrate on building some administrative tools. The first step in this process

is to visualize what Claudia wants, but you can make quite a few good guesses even before talking

to her. You can assume, for example, that she wants some way to manage products and categories.

You can also assume that she will need some way to track orders and export data. Before you make

too many assumptions, though, it ’ s time to meet with Claudia.

Gathering Requirements

When you meet with Claudia, she is in good spirits. In less than a week, she has been given a good

working site that ’ s easy for customers to use. Now she wants to concentrate on making the site

easier to use on the administrative side.

“ The first thing that I need to do, ” she says, “ is easily manage categories and products. ”

“ Yes, ” you answer, “ Let ’ s talk about administering categories first. ”

In 20 minutes, Claudia spells out what she needs:

A secure way to log in to the administrative panel

A dashboard that allows administrative users to manage categories and products

A way to create, edit, and delete categories

A way to create, edit, and delete products (including images and thumbnails)

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