I’ve been unconsciously making customisations for clients in the backend of Joomla for a while. Some of the changes have been subtle. I’ll start with those, using the Atum Administrator Template in Joomla 5.

United Colours

First off I like to make a change of colour scheme for my admin area. This is a nice-to-have and doesn’t affect functionality, however, in some cases a client has a development / staging version of their website and it would be great to make sure they’re logged into the right version wouldn’t it?

Besides colour scheme changes, Atum allows us to add an image on the login screen. All of this can be done using System > Administrator Template Styles. We have Colour Settings and Images Settings. The main template colour is changed using the “hue” setting and the light background colour is a lighter version of the navigation bar colour, in case you wanted to change that separately.

Having this colour as something quite different to the live site helps when answering support questions about why a change to an article hasn’t appeared on the site. “Are you on the green development area or the live red area?” This can also be solved by changing the live and development site usernames, sometimes I just append “_dev” to a username for that very purpose.

The image settings are useful for setting a client logo in place of the Joomla one. It’s not really “white labelling” but it does provide some personalisation for users. Another image change can be the login window which could also feature the client logo. Here’s my own rustic attempt, your client’s logo will obviously look much nicer.

Admin Users, Nearly Super Users

I always thought it was odd that the only user that could access the backend was a Super Admin, and so by default, it’s a user that can change everything about a site. In other CMS’s a user logs in and is then given options for what they can do based on their user level or permissions. Beyond content making changes, there are times when users accessing the backend shouldn’t have access to all the functionality.

To allow this, we can make changes in user permissions: System > User Permissions Settings

The user permission for Access Administration Interface & Administrator Login need to be changed to Allowed. It’s always best to create a new group to add a restricted backend user to as editing permissions for existing groups could cause issues.

Providing a custom backend by modifying permissions for a user is my favourite customisation without having to resort to plugins and extensions. I do however like one particular plugin that adds a button to my dashboard and really helps even on production sites where I have made lots of content updates. It means I can clear the cache at the click of a button and check back on the front end to make sure my changes have appeared. It might not seem like much, but any shortcuts that reduce mouseclicks and get the task done quicker are OK with me.

In this short example I’ve been using the Atum template, but there are a number of templates made for the administration area. In addition, there are extensions which provide different functionality for logged-in users. It’s also possible to make overrides for templates and maybe I’ll write about some possibilities in a future article.

If you want other ideas, check out Kevin’s Guide and Square Balloon’s own article on this subject.