Who's Using This Thing?
One major issue with the current Joomla admin interface is that you're presented with the same tools and info no matter what your duties may be. Even with the flexibility in more advanced Joomla admin templates like the ones we offer, the view only varies for Managers, Admins and Super Admins.
Joomla Is Too Powerful
This isn't really a problem, it's actually awesome. A side effect of Joomla's versatility though is that one user might need Admin privileges as a Blog Editor while another needs the same privileges as an Ecommerce Store Manager. Ruh-oh. Typically those 2 roles need very different access and tools.
ACL Will Fix This
The ACL in Joomla 1.6 will allow you to create roles for specific groups of users like "Blog Editor" and "Ecommerce Store Manager". You can then choose which admin menus and modules are able to be seen by these user groups.
Enough chit chat, let's see this in action.
Scenario 1: Ecommerce Store Manager
This is the mockup from my previous post. This user sees everything vital to his store: sales, affiliate sales, help desk stats, email stats and search analytics.
Scenario 2: Blog Editor
A blog editor would need to see a totally different dashboard with things like Popular articles, a quick way to add a post, and other things relevant only to articles. The menu items and favorite links would also be different for this user. This user might also want a different color theme and prefer to see text labels on the left menu since he's all about words.
Thanks to Marco Barbosa for the Popular Articles module idea from his Minima admin template
Browser Width Concerns
In the comments for the previous mockup one concern was the browser size. My mockups so far have been 1410px wide, which is suitable for monitors with resolutions of 1600px and above. What happens if the user has a smaller monitor or prefers to keep browser windows closer to 1024x786? A combination of fixed, elastic and fluid widths, along with the use of min-width and max-width will provide a great user experience for all browser sizes.
The text labels were an idea from previous comments as well, keep them coming?
Here's a mockup of the previous image viewed in a 1024 browser:
You can see that we'll design things in such a way that content is presented as optimally as possible.
What's Next?
In my next concepts I'll be working on designing the data lists (like the article manager) as well as the article editing view.
