AlumDeck
Live demo

Run · Admin panel

Thirteen areas. One sign-in each.

Committees change every few years. The admin panel is built for that: thirteen areas you hand out one at a time, a dashboard that shows what needs doing, and settings a newcomer finds by typing.

Sign in to the demo adminAll 20 features
  • 13admin areas to hand out
  • 3layouts, the same features
  • 8dashboard widgets
  • 45settings screens

How it works

An admin panel for volunteers who have day jobs.

Everything is permissioned, findable and arranged the way each person likes to work.

Permissions

Thirteen areas, handed out one at a time

Registrations, members, news, galleries, events, community, association, contact, heritage, giving, surveys, communications and users. Give a person the areas they need, each at view, edit or manage level; presets fill it in for an editor, an events volunteer, a treasurer or a membership secretary. Full administrators hold them all, plus settings, backups, member import and menus.

  • A person with no areas cannot enter the panel
  • Staff cannot promote themselves
  • Nobody can delete their own account
Read about security and access

Dashboard

A dashboard that says what needs doing

The first thing staff see is an attention queue: registrations waiting, contact messages, archive photos, mentoring and deletion requests, draft posts. Around it: a getting-started list, member and event figures, the giving overview, upcoming events, recent activity and two charts.

  • Each person reorders and hides widgets
  • A full admin sets the site default
  • Nobody sees a widget their areas do not allow
  • The getting-started list ticks an item only when it is really done
Sign in to the demo admin

Layouts

Three layouts, the same features

Console puts the menu along the top. Rail is a slim icon strip with a triage home. Atrium, the default, groups the menu into zones with a briefing home. They are three arrangements of the same screens, chosen for the site, per person or per device. Each person also picks light or dark mode.

  • Console, rail or atrium
  • Site default, personal choice, this device only
  • Every screen works at phone width

Command-K

Find any setting by typing

Press Command-K (Ctrl-K on Windows) and type. It finds every screen you are allowed to open, every single setting, and records: members, posts, events, gifts and appeals. It understands people's words: "smtp", "gdpr", "pixel" or "donate" all land on the right screen.

  • Screens, settings and records
  • Everyday words, not just field names
  • Only what your areas allow

Settings

Every setting on a screen, no config files.

Every setting AlumDeck has is on a settings screen, and a test fails the build if one is not. These twelve are the ones most sites open first; the others belong to particular features, such as page copy, security, automatic backups and updates. Settings are for full administrators only.

Twelve of the 45 settings screens
Settings screenWhat you set there
GeneralNames, your institution, membership questions, regional settings, the admin address, social links
Logo and brandingLogo, square badge, favicon, header subtitle, homepage photo, installable app on or off
Theme and coloursFour colours for the public site, applied without rebuilding anything
Admin appearanceThe default admin layout for everyone
HomepageFifteen kinds of block, dragged into order, cloned, shown or hidden
FooterColumns of text, links, contact details and social icons
EmailSMTP or sendmail, sender name, and a "send a test email" button
SEOSearch titles and descriptions for every page, verification codes and analytics IDs. The security headers AlumDeck sends allow each tag you add here, on Apache hosting too
Giving pageCurrency, receipt prefix and footer, the giving page
Privacy and cookiesThe cookie banner, how quickly deletion requests must be answered, and how long old data is kept
ModulesMore than fifty feature switches. Each one takes its feature out of the admin, the menus and the public site together, and deletes nothing
Maintenance modeA maintenance page for visitors, with your own message

Language and wording

Your language, your words.

Three screens that make the site sound like your association, with no code to touch.

Languages

Another language, translated by someone who speaks it

AlumDeck ships in English. For another language, Settings, Languages exports the wording as one file: every English line, with the translation so far beside it. A volunteer fills in the empty lines and you import the file back; each line is checked on the way in. Then set the default language and the languages members may choose on their profile. Guests can be shown the language their browser asks for, when you offer it, and a language written right to left is laid out that way.

  • A progress bar for each language, and a count of what is still missing
  • Imported lines are kept in the database, so an upgrade does not lose them
  • Never translated by machine

Your words

Say class, cohort or batch, and reword every heading

Schools say class, year group or cohort where AlumDeck says batch, and some networks say graduate where it says member. Settings, Wording holds those words, five in all: one year group and several, one person and several, and your organisation. Change one and it changes wherever the site uses it. Settings, Page copy then gives each built-in page three texts of its own to reword: the small line above the heading, the heading and the introduction.

  • Leave a box blank to keep the wording AlumDeck ships with
  • Web addresses stay the same when a word changes
  • Search titles and descriptions are on Settings, SEO

Page builder

Build a page from blocks, and keep the last ten versions

A page is one piece of rich text, or built from blocks: text, image and text, a gallery, people, questions and answers, a video or a map, statistics, a call to action, upcoming events, the latest news, an appeal card and columns. Lay it out full width or with an "On this page" column. AlumDeck keeps the last ten versions of a page and restores any of them, and a draft has a private preview link that works for an hour.

  • Twelve kinds of block on a page
  • Videos and maps from YouTube, Vimeo and Google Maps
  • The homepage is built the same way, from fifteen kinds

Records

Bring your records in, keep them clean.

Five kinds of record come in from a spreadsheet. Each import shows what it would do before it does it.

The five imports, each with a dry run first
ImportWhat it brings inGood to know
MembersA CSV from a spreadsheet register, a Google Forms export or an AlmaShines member file. Common column names are recognised by themselvesThe dry run shows what would happen and the first problem rows, and the full problem list downloads as a CSV. At the end, "Invite all from this import"
GiftsGift history, each amount in its row's own currency. Members are matched by number or email, appeals by titleA gift already recorded is skipped, by its reference or by donor, date and amount. No donor is emailed
Past eventsPast events and who came, one row per person per event, matched by title and dayEach attendee gets a "yes" reply and, with tickets on, a checked-in ticket. Nobody is emailed
MembershipsExisting members' tiers and renewal dates, once membership dues is switched onNothing is emailed and no invoice is made. Importing the same file twice changes nothing the second time
ContactsPeople who are not members, such as parents, donors and partner organisations, once Contacts is switched onNobody is emailed. It needs the members area at manage level; the other four are for full administrators

Duplicate records

Two records for one person, merged with an undo

Every night AlumDeck looks for member records that seem to be the same person: the same email address, the same phone number written any way, a similar name in the same year group, or the same name a year apart. The review screen puts the two side by side. You choose which record to keep and which value wins where they differ, and everything that pointed at the other record moves across: events, tickets, gifts, payments, groups, messages, forum posts, notes and history. A merge is one change, all or nothing, and is written to the audit log.

  • Nothing is merged without a person deciding
  • Undo puts both records back for 30 days, unless you change that
  • "Not the same person" keeps a pair off the list for good

Updates

A new release, installed from the Updates screen in two steps

Switch on "Check for new versions" and, when a release your licence covers is out, the Updates screen offers Download and install. AlumDeck checks the release's signature and its checksum, compares every file with your copy and tells you how many files and database updates it brings; nothing on the site has changed yet. Install now then keeps a rollback copy of every file it replaces and runs the database updates. If a step fails, the previous files go back by themselves.

  • Each of the two steps asks you to confirm before it starts
  • Every step is listed on the screen and in the audit log
  • The zip upgrade by hand still works, and is the fallback
Read the upgrade guide

Not yet

What the admin panel does not do yet.

A tag means a fix is planned. No tag means it is not.

  • Updates that install themselves: nothing changes until an administrator presses the button
  • Roles you name yourself, or permissions for a single record: access is by area and level, and four presets fill it in
  • An approval step before a post is published: a campaign can wait for someone with the right to send it, a post cannot
  • Changing the code: AlumDeck's own PHP is encoded with ionCube and may not be modified, decoded or redistributed. Wording, colours and layout are changed through Settings and the language files
  • A ready-made translation: no language but English ships, lines not yet translated show in English, and translations are never made by machine
  • robots.txt naming a custom admin address: it lists only /admin, and the noindex header covers the address you chose
Everything AlumDeck does not doThe public roadmap

FAQ

Questions committees ask

Can we give a volunteer access to just one thing?

Yes. Give them the one area they need, events for example, at view, edit or manage level, and that is all they see. The volunteer on the door at a reunion needs only the events area at view level to check tickets in.

Can a staff member make themselves a full administrator?

No. Only a full administrator can see or change the "full administrator" switch or grant the users area, nobody can give more than they hold themselves, and nobody can delete their own account.

Does the admin work on a phone?

Yes. Every screen works at phone width, which matters for the treasurer recording gifts at the dinner and the volunteer checking tickets at the door.

Can we move the admin to a different address?

Yes, in Settings, General. It must not clash with an address the public site already uses, and AlumDeck tells you to bookmark the new one because the old one stops working at once. As the screen itself says, it makes the panel harder to find, not harder to break into. The noindex header follows the panel to its new address, so search engines are still told to leave it out.

robots.txt still names only the default /admin address, not the one you chose.

Who is told when something needs doing?

Staff with the relevant area get an email and a notification on the admin bell, and can switch those off in their profile. Every Monday at 08:30 the committee also gets a digest of what is waiting.

How do we update to a new release?

From the Updates screen. Switch on "Check for new versions", and when a release your licence covers is out, press Download and install. AlumDeck checks the release's signature and its checksum and tells you how many files and database updates it brings; nothing has changed yet. Press Install now and it keeps a rollback copy of every file it replaces, then runs the database updates. If a step fails, the previous files go back by themselves.

Nothing installs by itself: an administrator presses the button. The manual zip upgrade still works, and is the fallback whenever the Updates screen refuses.

Sign in as the administrator. Click anything.

The whole admin panel, nothing held back. Change the layout, rearrange the dashboard, break things. It all resets tonight.

Open the live demoPricing - $49 a year

Sign-in details on the demo pageResets every night

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