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Hi this is most a request for help and advice than a question. I hope this is fine with the policies of this site as I think the answers can be useful for more users.

I developed a custom component for micro credits.

Users can request a loan and the administrator can grant or reject the loan. It is very complex with all the business flows, interest calculations, past due, emails and SMS notifications and lot more.

I have developed 3 areas so far:

  • The public front-end
  • A front end private area for customers where they can see their info, manage their loans, payments and so on.
  • Backend for super user where they can do everything: approved- reject loans, send bank transfers and much more. (Joomla backend)

Now I have to develop a new area for employees.

There would be at least two kind of employees, one group can receive customer call, check documentation and pre-approve loans. And the second one can confirm the pre-approved loans and send the money.

My question is:

What would be the best approach to build the employees area: Frontend or backend?

If I go for backend:

I will mainly have to work on the already built administration screens, working on define a profile inside Joomla administration that only allow employees to work in this component. Inside the component I will have to work on filtering the information according the user logged and the actions and views according to their profiles.

I will have all the basic joomla backend screen features and the screens are already done.

If I go for frontend:

I think it would be more professional as the admin screens will have the web site look and fell and not joomla.

I will have to create most of the screens again and I won’t have all the joomla backend help like toolbar, grid, and so on.

The final result, I think would be better, but It would be lot more work to do. Also, an admin frontend template would be great to have. Do you know one I can use?

Thanks for your thought and recommendations on this subject.

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    "I won’t have all the joomla backend help like toolbar, grid, and so on" - that's not true! As a real developer, you should understand how things work, and that "I won't have it" and "It won't be generated by default" are different things. All you have to do to make it work is: load the Class with JLoader to be able to call it, call render function in the view. It's 5-10 minutes of work. Maybe you'll have to manually call load admin languages, and add a few css lines to make buttons stand in a row.
    – Alexandr
    Nov 1, 2017 at 8:26
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    I would also suggest to go for the front-end implementation. Employees don't have to know or deal with anything Joomla.
    – FFrewin
    Nov 30, 2017 at 20:29

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Generally I would decide based on what's going to give the employees the best UI experience (which method will make their jobs the easiest). For that reason I'd lean towards using a front-end. As you say, you'd lose some of the tools but gain freedom in terms of template and UI/usability.

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