Admin Control Panel

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A screenshot of a vBulletin Admin Control Panel.
A screenshot of a vBulletin Admin Control Panel.

Administrator Control Panels (abbreviated AdminCP or ACP) are mostly used on Database Driven sites, a good example would be Internet forum software (e.g Invision Power Board, vBulletin, phpBB, and so on) and contain features that only Administrators are permitted to use, such as the management of forums and categories, the creation and editing of the forum's styles (HTML Templates and CSS), and "settings", such as the amount of posts shown on each page of a thread, or the length that signatures are allowed to be. Administrator Control Panels are used to make high level changes to the site that the AdminCP belongs to.

In terms of Internet forum software, many ACP's employ a framed type layout, with a scrollable menu on the left which loads the page in the larger frame on the right, a common setup in Internet forum software. In the case of Invision Power Board (2.1+) and phpBB (3.0+), the classic designs of Admin Control Panels has been rethought, now employing an arguably easier navigation method using tabs across the top and (non-framed) "sub"-menus on the left.

Many Internet forum software options available today allow Administrators to restrict certain areas of Admin Control Panels to certain users.