Hey all,

I'm wondering how easy it is to customise the admin interface for umbraco. I'm building a .Net app that will use Umbraco for its presentation layer... it will most likely use nodes in umbraco to act as pointers to the database records in my application. so opening a node will pass the node id to my app, whcih will then return all of the data for that node back to umbraco.

my question is, how would i go about building an admin interface in umbraco, so in the backend i can edit all of the info in my external DB through the node structure in umbraco, instead of building a separate admin interface? is it possible to do without hacking the core?

thanks all
greg

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Wishes he could work with Umbraco all the time.

Datatypes is something i haven't really explored much. I'll investigate more about them and how they can help me.

Any quick links to good references re: data types?

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Wishes he could work with Umbraco all the time.

Greg,

Look at the multiple content picker, and media pickers that are floating around. There was also a crop data type floating around at one point.

Hope this helps
Case

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Ughhh.. Ignore previous post. Thought pattern was a bit irregular at the moment. (I think I need banned during the early hours of the morning.)

You could go about creating a section for your admin forms, and give users access through the member section selection. An example of this is umbracoBackup.

In the section, you can have the tree menu act as your various controls, data, what ever you desire. The content in the main section is just .net web pages that you can customize yourself.

Overall, adding the section is easy. Working with the menu may be a bit more difficult, but should be simple enough. And creating your own admin forms, you will do fine.

on the front page of umbraco is an example of working with the menu, and implementing your own functionality into the admin interface. It is fairly detailed, and should get you started fine.

You may be able to use other scripting languages, or even remote call an admin interface if one is already built, but security may be an issue.

Later,
Case

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Actually, after re-reading the original post, my train of thought came chugging back. (bad puns).

You mentioned that you would have a node for each of the items in the database. My thought was that the node would have a data type that allowed you to select the data from the database, and store the identifier in umbraco.

As for the editing portion, my thought was that if a user clicked onto the node in umbraco, they would get the standard umbraco interface, with a custom control that would have all the fields showing from the remote db for the record associated to that node.

Upon save or publish, you would invoke your own save routine for your database. (through an even handler would be my guess, but there may be a built in interface for the datatypes - not sure, as I have not ventured into datatype creation yet.)

So, basically, your custom datatype stores an ID in umbraco, but has a bunch of fields that read/update your database as well. You could even go into deleting the remote data by watching the document type by using the event handlers as well.

As for creating, I would just go with a manual method on the datatype control that you would create.

Hope this makes sense. I know how powerful umbraco is, but this conversation has made me think how much more powerful it is with customization such as this.

--Any of the more adept developers have any comments on this approach?

Case

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Dude, you are sitting on top of the email tonight... :D

Read the above post. This would allow you to have your details on the other tabs, etc. You may have to get creative on your datatypes, but I think it can be done.

The trick is going to be tying the data stored in umbraco to the data stored in your other database.

Just be careful with your save/update logic.

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Ohh, then use a Usercontrol and Macros for the front end. When they submit the data, you create the node and add the data to your database at the same time.

The backend will be more on the lines of the datatype thing.

--I may be over-complicating things, so...

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