Neptune Programs: "Admins"

When I launched the public beta of my new Neptune framework, I mentioned that I would release several program running on Neptune that would be useful in their own right and serve as good examples of Neptune in use.

The first one of those programs is ready today. I don't think people are going to download Neptune to use this program, but it is broadly useful and a good example of some things that are different about Neptune.

The program is called "admins" and its purpose is a simple one. It manages administrators and log-ins for a site. It also has the ability to manage permissions per user - though it only does the data management portion of that, any restrictions based on those permissions would have to be handled separately.

So, why is this special? In one sense, it isn't. It doesn't do anything that isn't normally done for this kind of functionality.

While the program itself is not special, however, what it represents for Neptune is. This means that any program written for Neptune need not worry about this functionality. If you want to write a new blog program, for example, you can rest easy knowing that you don't need to worry about admin log-in functionality. The site owner can just use this program or another like it. You could even include it in your download it you like.

We have used this program (or some incarnation of it) in most of our sites for the past few years. Sometimes, of course, our needs diverge from this basic solution and we use something else. For the common needs, however, it is great to just drop this in.

Which bring me to some specs that I hope to include for each Neptune program that I release.

If you are planning to use Neptune for a web site and you would like some starter for to handle administrators and log-ins then you might want to give this a try. If you are just thinking about using Neptune, you might take a look as this is a pretty decent example of a real-world Neptune program that has had pretty heavy use.

Right now, the program produces the following component variables:

• Application.Admins
• Application.Permissions
• Application.Security

If I were to do this from scratch, I might have done the following instead:

• Application.AdminSecurity
• Application.AdminSecurity.Admins
• Application.AdminSecurity.Permissions

I kept it the original way due to the desire for backward compatibility for the large number of sites using the program and because it works very well either way.

Other than that, however, this example should be clean example of a Neptune program. Like any Neptune program, to install it simply drop it into your site and browse to the folder.

It does assume that your site administration area will be in the "admins" folder. If this is not the case, go to the "_public" folder in the program and change the subfolder there before browsing to the program folder.

You can download the "Admins" program or check the box next to "Admins" when creating a site on SebGen.com.

This program is open source and free for any use.