Web Admin for Silk

July 20th, 2008

I’ve started working on a web-based admin interface for Silk. I’m focusing it around basic CRUD actions and adding bonus features once those are polished. My goal is to make it as simple for end users as possible, while allowing developers to customize what features are presented based on user needs. Eventually I’d like to decouple it from Silk so that it can be used as a general-purpose web-based file manager.

Initially, I’d looked in to re-purposing an existing PHP file manager to fit my needs, but it was hard to find something that had:

• file management features
• text editing
• simplicity (both in the UI and codebase)

So, I ended up deciding to start from scratch. It’s been smooth going so far. I’ve got most of the features except file uploads and user authentication implemented and am working on the UI at the moment.

Power users will still probably want to use the command-line or regular desktop apps to manage their content (after all, this is what Silk was designed for), but some less-technical people who may be uncomfortable connecting to their web server via ftp or ssh will be thankful. I’m developing the admin interface as a plugin, so it can be easily removed/disabled, since it does introduce some potential security holes.

I’ll update this entry once I have something pretty to show everyone.