admin organization

[nisdats]

is there a modification that better organizes all the options and modules and names in the Admin panel?

I spend hours trying to figure it out. (where's all the options and how to get to them) And I still can't, if not for the fact that -thank God- other people posted their solutions on this awesome forum!

So I guess my question is.. Is there a mod that organizes all the Admin stuff in Alphabetical Order, or at least SOME other order for finding the options easier?

Im Sorry if this is a dumb question, its just that the stock categorization makes zero sense to me and I always get frustrated about it.

Do you guys just memorize where everything is or is it just me?

nisdats

[stevesh]

Sorry, no. Most of admin is left over from osCommerce, and a re-write is in the development plans.

It can be maddening, though. I've been using Zencart over 5 years, and I learned about something I didn't know was in admin here in the forums last week.

Alphabetical wouldn't help much, since what a lot of the options are called doesn't make any sense.

One thing I do is, when I get everything the way I want it, I save a screen shot of the admin pages I've changed something on.

[rstevenson]

Nisdats, I feel your pain.

A couple of times I've taken a stab at reorganizing the admin -- graphically, on paper -- just to get a feel for what's involved. I had some vague idea I could rewrite the pages that go into assembling the admin interface. In theory setting everything into classed DIVs would allow you to visually rearrange the page fairly easily. But what rearrangement would satisfy everyone? Aye, there's the rub.

I think I'll just wait for a later-than-2.0 version of ZC. I expect several birthdays to pass, though, before that happens. (Only because I'm a born cynic.)

In the meantime it might help to know that, as far as I can tell, each screen of options you see in admin contains the fields in one table of the database. In other words, the admin is arranged programmatically by database structure, rather than logically by end-user functions.

And stevesh's idea of printing a screen shot is excellent.

Rob