The most important aspect of the administration system is the menu. After all, it is the way we get around! Also, a menu, objectively, defines the areas that an administrator would wish to control and may allow a certain amount of restriction to certain areas. Having looked at the admin in 1.8 and other systems, here is my suggestion.
The menu would be contained in a sidebar (as with 1.8) probably using the same script. Each section would contain a site function plus all plugins associated with that function. This means that plugins should be allocated to a specific category. Where a plugin modifies and existing function (such as blogs) then this plugin is automatically added to the correct category and to the mother plugin.
Here is a break down of the sections:
The following would be default content items/plugins that are installed with the system:
These will appear, even if disabled, since they may contain content that should be available to the administrators.
Other plugins that might be added to this would be an announcement system, image galleries, and so on.
Each item would contain three default pages:
In addition, various other actions can be performed. In the case of blogs this could be layout and other template defaults, seeing what blogs exists and being able to disable those indivdual instances, central moderation of all blogs, and so on.
Other plugins would have additional functionality depending on the plugin - it would be up to the developer to create these management functions in line with the guidance.
The user section would containt the following menu items:
This is a fairly straight forward are which just manages plugins. The plugins can be sorted by category (categories relating to the other menu sections and sub sections) or alphabetically and so on. Each can be enabled or disabled singularly or globally. Also, plugins can be installed, deleted or updated from here.
At the risk of this being the "everything else" category, here are the main sections:
info@elgg.org
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