Admin Control Panel Overview

In this portion we will briefly describe each menu option in the arcade control panel. If you login to your back-end control panel by going to ‘www.yourdomain.com/admin’, as previously shown in Figure 3-15, you will see the according menu options in your arcade control panel as shown in Figure 4-1. 

ARCADE DASHBOARD (described in more detail below)

The Arcade Dashboard will display site statistics, notes, and a few online resources.

SITE CONFIGURATION (described in more detail below)

The Site Configuration allows us to change some of our arcade settings such as titles, descriptions, etc.

CATEGORIES

In the Categories section we can manage or add game categories to our arcade

AUTHORS

The Authors section allows us to add the game creators information to specific game pages.

COMMENTS

The Comments section will allow us to edit/delete comments and edit spam filters.

LINKS

The Links section allows us to manage and add links to other arcade sites.

SPONSORS

In the Sponsors section we can add and manage sponsor ads to specific games.

ADVERTISEMENTS

The Advertisement section allows us to manage and add new advertisements to our arcade.

Figure 4-1 The arcade control panel menu.

ADVERTISERS

The Advertisers section allows us to manage and add advertiser information such as name, URL, and contact.

AD ZONES

In the Ad Zones section we are able to manage and add specific locations to place ads on our site.

MESSAGES

In the Messages portion we can view/edit/delete messages that our arcade users have sent to each other.

NEWS POSTS (described in more detail below)

We can edit and add new posts in the News Posts section. These news posts will be displayed to our arcade visitors.

NEWSLETTERS

The Newsletters section allows us to send out newsletters/emails to our arcade members. From the newsletters section we can send out a mailing list to all our members.

STAFF

In the Staff part we can assign members to be on our staff and configure settings in our arcade control panel.

CUSTOM PAGES

The Custom Pages section allows us to add our own custom pages to be displayed in our arcade.

BANNING

From the Banning menu we can ban specific IP Addresses from visiting our arcade.

STATS & LOGS

From the Stats & Logs section we will be able to view statistics and logs for each day about most popular games, number of games played, number of visitors, and other statistical information about our arcade.

LOG OFF ACP

The Log Off ACP allows us to log out of our Admin Control Panel.

All the control panel menu options are briefly described above; do not feel overwhelmed if any of the options above are not clear, they will become apparent in time. The next sections of this hour we will be going over some of these options in more detail. Later on through the book we will visit other menu options in more detail as we need to use them.

The menu options that we are going to be using in this hour are the Arcade Dashboard, Site Configuration, and News Posts.