Adding a business screen to the back office

The typical need

These requests always share the same shape: business information exists, it relates to products, customers or orders, and the admin shipped with the platform can’t display it. For want of anything better it is kept alongside, in a file nobody truly keeps in sync.

A business screen puts that information back where it belongs. In practice it takes the form of a tab in the admin menu, with a filterable, sortable list, a detail view, and usually an export. Access rights lean on the profiles already defined in the store, which avoids inventing a second permission system.

How I approach this kind of work

I lean on the platform’s admin mechanisms rather than on a standalone page. On PrestaShop that means an admin controller declared by the module, with its menu entry, its permissions and its actions, giving a screen consistent with the rest of the back office. On WordPress it goes through an admin page registered by the extension, using the native list component when the data suits it.

That choice has an important practical consequence: the screen inherits access control, breadcrumbs, translations and the platform’s look. A page built beside the admin system is quicker to write and far more expensive to live with, because it ages separately.

I pay particular attention to volume: a business list always ends up holding far more rows than expected. Pagination at database level, filters that rely on indexes, and an export that doesn’t load everything into memory at once.