Hi all,

Just wondering what is the best approach is for customizing the admin area for Joomla.
I would like to remove various elements from my clients (above and beyond what the standard template allows me to) to simplify their experience and stop them from breaking things.
I also want to do a bit more work on the branding to fit it into our look and feel.

I have been looking at the AdminPraise template and extensions for $99. Would this be the best way to go? I am looking for ease of set up here and don't mind paying the money.

Would be interested to hear anyone's thoughts.

thanks,

Ant S.

Yes thought the same thing a couple of months ago and bought AdminPraise.

Now when my clients log in they see just a link to the article manager, one to the images (media manager), and perhaps one other one to a photo gallery (if using) or something like that. That's it!

With AdminPraise you can set everything to admin or super admin level except for those couple of things, and then add on a couple of links. It's not super fine grained control, though - a custom link to the article manager still allows access to the section/category etc. managers. And a person can type in the URL if they know it (but clients wouldn't).

Of course as I understand it 1.6 supercedes this fiddling, but, AdminPraise looks very nice too, and is definitely easier to use. They do neat things like change the text from "save" and "apply" to "save & close" and "save". I guess most of us are still in 1.5 though.

One or two gripes: AdminPraise doesn't necessarily integrate with some other admin plugins, most notably NoNumber extensions. And you'll want to make sure that your component views are good - some aren't, because they use custom views and AdminPraise overwrites some but not all of it, causing some components to look ugly.

As for branding, they add their own (even in paid version), and I don't know what their stance is on removing it.