Mike Mertsock

Over the past year, I’ve been working on a complete admin management system written in ColdFusion. It is functional now at a sort of “alpha” stage. The decision-makers in charge just gave me the permission to go open source with this project. Over the next few weeks, the project will find hosting on SourceForge.net or CFOpen.org, get a good name, and begin the completion of version 1.0.

About the project

This project is currently called Universal Admin, but it probably needs a new name. Its goal is to provide a centralized database and management system for all of the various back-end administrative systems an organizational web site may have. For example, Alfred University (for whom this project was initially created) has over a dozen independent admin sections for its ColdFusion web applications. The Universal Admin system provides:

• Single signon and single point of entry
• Core user profiles shared by all admin systems
• Database-based and NT domain-based authentication
• Context-sensitive navigational pane customizable per-user and per-app
• Centralized roles-based security management
• Plugin hooks to customize role/permission assignments for each app
• Core management section for administering users and applications
• A consistent API for all admin sections to use

I don’t see any other ColdFusion applications out there like this. So this project might prove useful for a few medium-to-large organizations out there that use ColdFusion heavily.

Implementation

I am implementing the current version of Universal Admin using Fusebox 3 for the core management section and ColdFusion Components (CFCs) for the API. Once you install the database and management site, you build (or rewrite) the actual admin sections using the API. The core management site itself uses the API whenever possible and the database treats the core site as just another admin section. This should help keep things more modular, extensible, and maintainable.

Fusebox 4 or Mach-II would be good candidates for a future version of the core site.

Get involved!

Watch for more news as I get this project set up on an open source collaboration site. Then help program and test, please? Meanwhile, it would be great if someone could come up with a better name … that seems to be the hardest part. Post a comment with ideas!

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 28th, 2005 at 1:28 am and is filed under Web Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.