#330: New Admin Tools

Chris & Marie talk about a big long project that we've finished at CodePen: our new Admin Tools. Any web app is gonna need 'em. They do stuff that is unique to customer service on your app. Say you need to manually trigger a password reset email or hand-verify an account. You look them up in an Admin Tool, and perform those specialized actions. Our Admin Tools are heavily focused on users and content. We've totally re-built them to focus on the UX of actually doing customer support, as well as to make a clean UI that users the same componentry that the main CodePen app does. We do a lot of spam cleanup in our Admin Tools as well, so getting a chance to re-think those experiences was satisfying. We dove into this project not just to make customer support better, but because of an alignment of concerns. We got to use a whole new development stack to do this, using technology we wanted to prove out for more of CodePen. We used Next.js on the front end and for server side rendering, and a Go-powered GraphQL API for the data. We made it all work in our monorepo. We build tools for deployment, so in a cool twist of fate, this app can deploy itself. Jump Links Sponsor: Mailpoet If you build your website and business around WordPress, you're in good hands for a lot of reasons. One of which is that you own your site, you own your own data, you own all aspects of what powers your business, and the rug can't get pulled out from under you entirely. Check out this article and video on how to make a paid subscription newsletter with WordPress + WooCommerce + Mailpoet. That is a business model right there, from which you can grow forever entirely under your control.