Professional CodeIgniter®

Chapter 6. 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.