Empowering users with our new Dashboard.
As a developer-first company, we’re always trying to refine our tools and interfaces to provide the best possible experience for our developers. Today, we’re proud to announce the first release of our new Dashboard, a developer-centric admin console that makes it much easier for Commerce Layer administrators to manage their store’s set-up and applications.
We’ve received feedback from our users that while the current dashboard was functional, it didn’t provide much in terms of enablement or ease of use for the developer audience. For the past few months, we’ve been hard at work building this new interface, one that better addresses the needs of the administrative user. Now, the Dashboard makes it much more intuitive to discover and manage key resources, applications, role management and more.
The Home page
Part of what we wanted to do with this redesign is to clean up our interface and make the flow much more natural and intuitive. In this case, we change the original home view to direct administrators to key resources and reorganized certain functions into different pages where they make more sense.
Once you sign in, the first thing you’ll notice about our new dashboard is a redesigned home screen, which you can use to access key developer resources like our GitHub repos and documentation, as well as critical updates on our changelog and blog.
On the top left hand of the screen, you’ll see your organization name (in this case, Dia Records). By clicking the arrow, you can you can toggle between organizations if necessary. If the organization is in test mode, the slider to activate your store will be below the organization name.
The Resources page
A large part of the administrative function is to streamline support operations. When it comes to resolving issues with any part of Commerce Layer, the vast majority of them are seen in the set up of the resources that make up the Commerce Layer store. In light of that, we’ve introduced a new view that enables admins to view every single resource within a Commerce Layer organization.
In the Resources page, you can find all of the resources you’ve built out in Commerce Layer. They’re separated by resource type like as in our API reference: addresses, orders, customers, stock locations, markets, and much more. Think of it as a visual representation of the resources plugin on our CLI.
Upon this first release, the Resources page will be read-only. Right now, it’s meant to give administrative users a comprehensive and aggregated view of all resources, which can help diagnose support issues. Administrators can search for objects by their ID and get a complete rundown immediately.
To see how deep you can go in our Resources page view, let’s take a look at the order object of our in the example view below:
As you can see, each order is shown along with its ID and the timestamp of when it was created. By clicking into the order, you also see all of its attributes (and their values) and any relationships with other objects. For example, orders will have relationships to a market, customer, payment method, and much more.
In future releases, we will work to add CRUD operations to the Resources page, so that admin users can directly create, edit, or delete any Commerce Layer resource from the page itself.
The Applications page
Applications are a key part of any Commerce Layer set-up. We understand that while we provide the best possible commerce components to power your store, there are extensions and third-party integrations that are required to fully execute upon your brand vision. In light of this, we cleaned up our interface to better manage Commerce Layer applications and make them more accessible.
The Applications page is where you manage the applications associated with your Commerce Layer account. We’ve redesigned the flow of the page to make it easier and more intuitive to create, manage, and delete your Commerce Layer applications and their credentials.
When you click on “Add new”, you’ll see that you can create three types of applications:
- Sales Channel: used to built any customer touchpoint, such as the online checkout, a Microstore, mobile checkout and more.
- Integration: used to integrate a 3rd-party system with Commerce Layer on the backend.
- Webapp: used to connect custom-built applications to supplement your Commerce Layer set up.
As you create your applications, the Applications page will serve as your node to manage them. From here, you can access your applications and see their credentials. You can also edit certain attributes like name, role permissions, and access token expiry of your application by pressing the Edit link at the top.
The Members page
Role management is very important to maintaining the integrity of any technology service or platform. Administrators need to dole out permissions in a sensible and scaleable way, which is why we’ve revamped our user management interface in our brand new Members page.
The Members page manages all Commerce Layer users that are part of the account. Here, administrators can manage the roles of each user and invite new ones as needed.
The page is made up of the member’s names and their roles underneath. By clicking into each member, you’ll be able to change the roles as set up by the administrator in the Settings page. Administrators can also control the application access of members in this view as well, or delete the user if necessary.
The Settings page
The Settings page provide access to the general settings of your organization, and also serves as the area where administrators can build custom roles (which can then be assigned to different users on the Members page).
The settings are very similar to the previous dashboard, this is where you set up the brand’s name, branding assets (logos, favicon), Google Tag Manager credentials, and support contact information. All of these settings are reflected in our hosted applications — our Hosted checkout, Hosted cart, Microstore, etc.
The new and improved custom roles are an Enterprise-only feature that enables administrators to build custom roles down to the resource level. For example, order management users may have read-write access to certain resources pertaining to orders, but no access to other critical resources such as payment gateways or markets.
In the future, we will also extend role permissions based on data and relationships in the resource. For example, role permissions will soon be granular enough to activate support teams that will only access and manage orders from their home markets or with their native currency.
A big part of our new dashboards was ensuring we revamped our approach to roles and permissions, and giving this level of granular control of member access to administrators is crucial in maintaining the security and reliability of the entire Commerce Layer set up.
Our legacy Order Management (the Admin area)
Since this is the first release of our new Dashboard, we’ll be keeping our legacy Admin area for our users who interact with it for order management and support. In order to access that view, you simply have to click on Admin area link on the bottom of the menu, and you’ll be taken straight there.
As we continue to release new applications into the Dashboard view — packages, orders, subscriptions — we will eventually deprecate the Admin area after we’ve ported over its functionality into the new Dashboard view.
That’s all the major changes to the new Dashboard view. We designed it to be as intuitive and simple to use as possible, especially for our developer admins. We’d love to hear what you think — sign in and start exploring for yourself, and let us know what you like (or don’t like) at our developer community on Slack!