Does anyone know any article comparing/analyzing CMS admin areas?

[mouser]

I've been working on structuring the Administrative area for the big web framework project I've been working on (YUMPS), and I've become quite interested in the issue of structuring the "Administrative" area. 

That is, I'm interested in the different ways that CMS systems set up their administrative/moderation areas (control panels, etc.) for system admins and moderators.

I'm interested not so much in the visual "look" (though I am interested in that too) but in the philosophy of organizing the areas in terms of things like navigation structure (hierarchical menu organization, etc.).  And some related issues like how to handle cases where different moderators have different permissions to access certain settings, etc.

Anyone know any good comparisons or essays on the subject?

Anyone who has experience with lots of different modern CMS systems have a take on one or two that handles this particularly well?

[Renegade]

I can't tell you about any essays, but from installing and checking out different CMSes over the years, I still really love the DNN admin UI. It really is done very well. It's worth checking out as it is very intuitive and easy.

Joomla is total insanity by comparison.

Wordpress is mediocre comparatively, but certainly better than Joomla, which is hard to be worse than. (Though I did write a CMS in 2001 or 2002 that sucked pretty bad for the admin UI, and was worse than Joomla aesthetically, though functionally it did what it was meant to do very well for even users that suffered from near brain-death.)

The Host/Admin/Site concept works well in DNN. Permissions are also very good with Portal, Site, Page, Module, and module internal permissions.

However, like every CMS out there... DNN suffers from the same idiotic notion that you only need 1 database user for the entire application... But that's not about the UI/interface, and just an internal pet peeve of mine.

There are some CMS review sites out there, but I'm guessing that you've already been over them.

[joiwind]

Mouser - you could perhaps have a look at Dotclear : it's a blog platform (and French, but that shouldn't put you off) Dotclear features (and there is an english version). I know a blog isn't what you want but if you look around and try to find a test site I think you'll find that the admin area is well thought out.

As for comparisons, this is one of the best I've seen.

[kwacky1]

I'd highly recommend that you check out ModX (www.modx.com), the admin side is one of the reasons I keep recommending it and using it for my projects.

Revolution has a built in Form Customization feature that lets you turn off various areas of the UI depending on the level of access the logged in user has and/or other criteria entirely.