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A low-code solution for our customers' rapid success.
In one of our recently completed customer projects, the goal was to get to market as quickly as possible. Not too many things were to be reinvented.
There are already countless, excellent CMS systems on the market. That's why we decided to use such a low-code solution as admin panel for this project.
Requirements
The requirements for this project were not overly complicated. The web application should present products in an appealing way and make the ordering process as easy as possible.
The admin interface for the administration of the products and the compilation of the corresponding catalogs is only operated by a few selected administrators.
Of course, the application should be ready for use as quickly as possible and as inexpensive as possible.
Idea
Together with the customer we decided to focus on the frontend (the catalog). At the same time, we wanted to keep all options open and be able to make further developments in the admin area with the code base at a later date.
We decided to use our familiar frontend & backend architecture. Only the admin area, i.e. the UI that enables the administration of the products and catalogs, is covered by an existing CMS solution as a drop-in.
Implementation
The modeling of the products and catalogs from a technical point of view happens in the .NET Core backend. The tables are created and maintained by our backend using migrations.
The backend is also responsible for the API that addresses our frontend to display the catalog and products and to create and trigger orders.
So all we were missing was the drop-in admin panel or CMS. We set out to find it. This admin panel should:
- be open source
- run on our infrastructure
- be able to connect to an existing database and take over the models
- be easy to administrate and to use
Directus as Admin Panel
We have chosen Directus.
- Directus is open source
- Directus can be installed in Docker containers directly into our cluster.
- the UI is designed to be simple and easy to understand
- since all settings and preferences are written to the DB, Directus can be easily backed up and moved to a new infrastructure
- we can pull the existing tables (and those created and maintained by the backend) into Directus and even configure the relationships
- the uploaded images can be easily stored at our cloud provider