3. The Back End

The back end is the admin section for Kartris. In some cases the terms 'back end' and 'admin section' may be used interchangeably.

3.1. Logging in

To access the back end of your Kartris site, go to:

[your site domain]/Admin/

You will need your username and password. Note that if you forget these details, it is not possible for anyone to recover them, since they are 'hashed' for security. Instead, they can only be reset.

If you have another user who has 'config' permissions in the back end, they can edit your login and create a new password for you. If you are the only admin, then you must either using the Data Tool to do the reset, or force your site to run the setup routine again, see @2.7. Forcing the install routine to run again.

3.2. Navigation and toolbar buttons

This section gives a quick overview of getting around within Kartris. We'd strongly recommend you read this section as some of the useful features which will save you a lot of time and hassle but aren't necessarily obvious.

A. Front/back end toggle - this button takes you to the front end of the web site. A similar button will be visible on the front end if you are logged in as an admin, to take you to the back end. The button is context aware - if you are viewing a product, category, custom page or KB article, the button will toggle you to the same item in the front or back end.

B. Start/stop Kartris - You can open and close the front end of Kartris using this button. When logged in as admin, you can still see the front end, but the public will see a 'site closed' message instead.

C. Main menus - These dropdown menus provide access to all Kartris's back end features.

D. Login status - Your username is displayed here, together with four pips indicating permissions for various roles in Kartris. A solid pip (as above) indicates you have the permission, a hollow pip indicates you don't. You can hover on each pip to see the permission role it corresponds to.

E. Logout button - Does what is says on the tin.

F. Home button - Takes you to the back end home page.

G. Category treeview - this is an expandable navigation menu showing the entire product catalogue. For performance reasons, sections are loaded up if expanded via AJAX, so the entire menu (with all content) does not have to be rendered. Items that are turned off ('Show on site' is unchecked) show with grey icons.

H. Category home page - Displays the top level categories page, you can drill down to any item from here.

I. Refresh cache - For performance reasons, Kartris caches most types of content that change rarely and are not user-specific. In most cases, the caches will automatically be updated when necessary, but this button forces caches to clear just in case. It will also reset the treeview to the default position.

J. To do list - Kartris will flag tasks that need your attention such as new orders, items out of stock, and so on.

K. Search - This handy search box will find most things; products, versions, customers, language strings, config settings, etc. You can of course search for these things from within their respective sections. But generally it's just easier to put an SKU or a customer email address in here and let Kartris to the heavy lifting.

3.3. Creating and managing logins

Kartris will create an admin account for you during the setup process. However, many store owners will need to have multiple staff members accessing the back end. Kartris therefore allows an unlimited number of extra back end accounts to be created, with varying levels of access.

3.3.1. Creating logins

The login management page can be found by going to Configuration > Logins. All logins for the site will be displayed in tabular format. Checkboxes show the permissions settings for each account, as well as whether or not the login is live.

The primary login accounts for Kartris don't have any 'delete' option and the permissions for these accounts cannot be changed. This ensures that the main admin accounts are always valid, and that you cannot inadvertently lock yourself out of control by removing the primary accounts or reducing their access level.

Note that anyone with config permissions can create new users with any permissions they wish, or edit their own permissions to give themselves any permissions they choose. Bear this in mind if you grant configuration permissions to a user but deny them 'orders' permission, for example. The user would be able to edit their own permissions to give themselves 'order' permissions if they wanted.

3.3.2. Setting permissions

User accounts can be restricted using the permissions checkboxes so that they can only access certain areas in the back end. The back end is divided into four broad areas:

Configuration permissions - user can change config values, shipping, tax, countries and other setup details
Product permissions - user can view/edit categories, products and versions
Orders permissions - user can view/change customers, orders, affiliates and coupons
Support permissions - user can view/change support tickets and knowledgebase articles

This permissions structure serves two purposes. Firstly it allows you to prevent certain users from being able to make major changes to site settings, or products, for example, while allowing them to process orders. Secondly, it simplifies the back end somewhat by removing extraneous menus for users who do not need them.

3.4. Config settings

The config settings should not be confused with the web.config, which is a file on the site holding basic configuration for the site including the database connection. Config settings control all kinds of things relating to the functioning of your store, from the sizes of various images to the availability of certain features to users.

Values are stored in the database (in the tblKartrisConfig table); this has a number of advantages over setting values in the web.config.

Keeps the web.config relatively uncluttered
Works even when there is no 'write' access to the root (where the web.config is located)
Does not force the application to restart (which editing the web.config does)
Helps config settings to persist when you upgrade Kartris to a newer version
Config settings can be searched easily from the main back end search box, or from their own dedicated search box within the config settings section.

Some important config settings are set during the setup routine; most of the others are less critical and can be tweaked later once you have Kartris running and your site under development.

3.4.1. Finding config settings

Config settings can be located most easily from any back end page using the general search box. Just enter a part of the name of the config setting, and the system will find any matching records (up to 15 maximum can be displayed). Since config settings are named fairly logically, you can generally find relevant ones by entering a single word search such as 'images' or 'SSL'.

If you are less familiar with the config settings, you will find it easier to navigation to the config settings page (Configuration > Config Settings). From here you can navigate a hierarchical dynamic menu of the config settings. Hovering over either 'frontend', 'backend' or 'general' links will open out the menu – new sections will fold out as you hover over certain entries. This can be a good way to explore and find new settings relevant to particular features.

3.4.2. Changing config settings

Once you have located a config setting, you can click to edit it. Be extremely careful to ensure that you do not set config settings to an invalid value. This can cause errors in the operation of Kartris. Great care should be taken to double check values being changed before you click to submit any changes.

It is also possible to change config setting values directly in the tblKartrisConfig table of the database. However, the new setting will only take effect after the site is restarted (this is because the actual config setting values that Kartris uses are stored as application variables which are built when the application starts from the database values - updating config settings through the Kartris back end also triggers a rebuild of these values).

3.4.3. Useful config settings

There are a huge number of config settings and we won't include them all. But there are some important and useful ones which are worth highlighting.