[ic] PHP/IML - IML Admin Tools

[Russ Mann]

-snip john beima's lengthy and thoughtful response--
> To sum it up, if you spent the time to write your users tools in IML like
you
> did in PHP, you will find you can develope much stronger and tigher
> intergration. All you have to do is get past the fear of saying why am I
using
> these tools that restrict me soooo much.

I see your point that IML has some more powerful features than PHP coding,
and that taking the time to figure out how to do these things in IML would
be worth my while.  Ok, to go another route, has anybody written admin tools
in IML that aren't part of the UI?  How would you do this, just put your
pages in the pages/my_custom_admin/ directory and just code until daylight?
Are there any sharing projects on the "we wrote our own in IML" admins?  Do
you have to use a separate UserDB to keep it apart from your customer
database?

Has the IC devel. group considered making the UI admin to be catalog
specific, instead of global?  That way a person could install a catalog,
with an admin, customize for the use, and not have to worry about things
breaking on an upgrade.  I think if this happened a bunch more people would
submit fixes/changes/etc. for the UI because it would be used more.

Probably the main reason I used PHP to fix my problems is that I had already
written all the auth code, database insert/edit/delete code, and search
engine in PHP, and it was just easier to re-use that code than trying to
figure out from scratch how to do it in IML.  I even have some cool PHP
functions that take a data table field and turn it into a dropdown menu, or
a group of checkboxes.

Thanks for your thoughts on this John!

Russell