Professional CodeIgniter®

6.1. 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)

• A way to easily assign a product to a category

• A way to assign products to categories in batch mode

• A way to assign products to groups in batch mode

• A way to export category and product listings

The first order of business has to do with the admins. Are there going to be more than one? Do they need to have different access levels to the different components?

Claudia thinks about it for a few seconds and shakes her head. "In the future, we may have a need for more administrator logins and privileges, but I don't think we need it now."

"Point taken," you answer, "but it may be easier to put something rudimentary in now. Perhaps a simple way to keep track of users and which parts of the system they can enter — categories, products, orders, and export functions."

"As long as ...