Alokai Connect Admin
An admin panel where your team edits configuration and runs approval workflows - all defined by your developers.
Connect Admin is the admin panel that ships with Alokai Connect. The idea behind it is a clear division of work: developers describe what can be edited, and business users decide what the values are - in a friendly UI, without waiting for a deploy. Every change is versioned, so you can prepare a change as a separate version, review it, and make it live when it's ready - or go back to an older version if it turns out to be a mistake.
Not the Alokai Console
This is a different product from the Alokai Console. The Console manages your cloud infrastructure (deployments, domains, CDN). Connect Admin manages your application's own configuration and jobs, defined by your developers.
With Connect Admin your team can:
- edit structured configuration in validated forms, without a redeploy
- keep a version history, plus a Live only for me mode that lets you check a version yourself before making it live for everyone
- run multi-step workflows with human review and approval gates
- let other systems start workflows automatically, through a connection your developers set up
How it fits together
Behind the scenes there are two applications and one shared database:
- The storefront server (the middleware) answers shoppers and reads the values your team made live.
- The Connect Admin panel runs as its own separate application. It has two halves: the screens you work in (served to your browser) and a backend that validates and saves your changes and runs the workflows.
- Other systems your developers connect - a scheduler, a CI job - can start workflows too, by calling the panel's backend directly.
- The database is the one place everything meets: the panel's backend writes there, and the storefront server reads from there. The two applications never talk to each other directly.
Features and views
Everything in the panel comes from features your developers set up:
| Concept | What it is |
|---|---|
| Feature | One area of your app you administer (for example "Companion Products"). Each feature keeps its own version history. |
| View | One screen in the panel, one entry in the sidebar, with its own web address you can share. |
| Kinds of screens | A form you fill in and publish, or workflows - step-by-step jobs you run and approve. |
A typical change travels through the panel like this:
- A developer describes a feature in code and ships it. From that moment the feature has its own screens in the panel.
- A business user opens the panel and edits the values. They can prepare the change as a separate version, review it, and make it live when it's ready.
- Once the version is live, the site shows the new values right away - no deploy, no waiting.
How this documentation is organized
The documentation is divided into two sections, one per audience - pick yours: