How-Tos Archives | Grid PHP Framework

Turn AdminLTE, SB Admin, Tabler & Any Bootstrap Template Into a Working Application. Bootstrap admin templates solve the design problem, GridPHP solves the functionality problem. Integrate GridPHP with popular templates to get Full CRUD capabilities in under 2 hours.

The Problem Every Developer Faces

You’ve just downloaded or purchased a beautiful admin template – maybe AdminLTE, Sb-Admin, Tabler, or a premium ThemeForest theme. The dashboard looks stunning. The charts are polished. The UI components are pixel-perfect. The documentation is comprehensive.

But here’s what’s missing: actual functionality.

Admin templates give you beautiful layouts, stunning widgets, and impressive demo pages. What they don’t give you is the ability to actually manage data. There’s no way to:

Create new users, products, or records
Display database records in searchable, sortable tables
Edit existing data with validated forms
Delete records with proper confirmation
Filter and search through your data
Export data to CSV, Excel, or PDF
Handle pagination for large datasets
Manage relationships between database tables

In short: admin templates lack CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations – the fundamental building blocks of any real application.

This means developers spend 40-60 hours after buying a template to hand-code these basic operations. You’re essentially paying for a beautiful frontend, then rebuilding the entire backend from scratch for every project.

Use Cases & Scenarios

Small Business Owners Running Their Own Tech

You’re managing a retail shop, restaurant, or service business. You need to track inventory, customers, or bookings but can’t justify hiring a developer or paying for monthly SaaS subscriptions. You have basic PHP knowledge but realize the template you downloaded has no actual functionality.

Solo Developers Taking on Small Client Projects

You’re a freelancer building internal tools for local businesses on tight budgets. You can’t spend days building CRUD interfaces from scratch and still make money. You need something that works fast so you can focus on the business-specific logic.

Non-Profits and Community Organizations

You work for a non-profit with zero budget for software subscriptions. You need to manage donors, volunteers, or event attendees. Someone on your team knows enough PHP to run a website on shared hosting, and you need something that looks professional without ongoing fees.

Students and Bootcamp Graduates Building Portfolio Projects

You’re learning web development and need portfolio pieces that demonstrate real-world skills. You want to show you can build full-stack applications with professional UI, but hand-coding admin interfaces for every project eats up time you could spend learning other technologies.

IT Staff at Small-to-Medium Companies

You work in-house IT and management keeps asking for internal tools but won’t approve budget for enterprise software or outside developers. You’re already stretched thin and can’t spend weeks building admin interfaces for employee directories, asset tracking, or PTO request systems

How GridPHP Solves This

GridPHP bridges this gap by providing production-ready CRUD functionality that integrates seamlessly with any Bootstrap admin template:

What GridPHP Adds:

Database-driven datagrids – Display any database table with sorting, searching, and pagination
Inline editing – Edit records directly in the grid or through modal forms
Advanced filtering – Filter by any column with dropdown, date range, or text search
Bulk operations – Delete, export, or update multiple records at once
Data validation – Built-in validation rules for forms
Export functionality – Export to CSV, Excel, PDF with one click
Responsive design – Works perfectly on desktop, tablet, and mobile
Customizable themes – Automatically matches your template’s styling

The Result: Your AdminLTE, Sb-Admin, or any Bootstrap template goes from “beautiful but empty” to “beautiful and functional” in under 2 hours – without writing repetitive CRUD code or modifying the template’s design.

Instead of spending weeks building user management, product catalogs, order processing, and other data operations from scratch, you configure GridPHP once and get all of it working immediately.

Testcase Templates

I integrated GridPHP with multiple admin templates – from premium to free, Bootstrap 4 to Bootstrap 5 – to discover something powerful: any Bootstrap-based admin template (AdminLTE, AdminKit, Vuexy, SB Admin 2, Tabler, and hundreds more) can become a fully functional application in under 2 hours. I validated the integration approach with these templates representing different styles and price points:

Free Templates:

AdminLTE – 45,000+ GitHub stars, most popular
SB Admin 2 – 16,997+ downloads, Bootstrap 4 classic
Tabler – Modern Bootstrap 5, minimal and fast

Premium Templates:

Vuexy – 29,600+ ThemeForest sales, Bootstrap 5
Limitless – Material Design, enterprise-grade

These represent the full spectrum of Bootstrap templates available today. The same approach works with Sneat, Gentelella, Material Dashboard, Argon, and virtually any other Bootstrap-based template.

Integration Results

All templates integrated successfully with full CRUD capabilities including: create/read/update/delete operations, search and filtering, pagination, data export (CSV, Excel, PDF), responsive design, and template styling preservation.

✅ AdminLTE (Free – Bootstrap 4)

Integration Time: 40 minutes
Difficulty: Very Easy
Result: Perfect integration

AdminLTE is the most popular free admin template with 45,000+ GitHub stars. Its clean Bootstrap 4 structure and extensive documentation made integration straightforward.

Screenshot:

✅ Vuexy (Premium – Bootstrap 5)

Integration Time: 45 minutes
Difficulty: Easy
Result: Perfect integration with dark mode

Vuexy represents modern Bootstrap 5 templates with 29,600+ ThemeForest sales. The integration matched the template’s modern aesthetic perfectly, including dark mode support.

Screenshot:

✅ SB Admin 2 (Free – Bootstrap 4)

Integration Time: 35 minutes
Difficulty: Very Easy
Result: Flawless integration

With 16,997+ downloads, SB Admin 2 was the fastest integration thanks to its straightforward Bootstrap 4 structure and standard classes.

Screenshot:

✅ Tabler (Free – Bootstrap 5)

Integration Time: 40 minutes
Difficulty: Very Easy
Result: Fast, modern integration

Tabler is a popular open-source Bootstrap 5 template known for its minimal design and fast performance. The clean codebase made integration smooth.

Screenshot:

✅ AdminKit (Free – Bootstrap 5)

Integration Time: 50 minutes
Difficulty: ⭐⭐☆☆☆ (Easy)
Result: Clean, contemporary integration

AdminKit represents modern minimalist templates like Volt or Soft UI Dashboard. The modern Bootstrap 5 approach and minimal design philosophy resulted in a fast, contemporary admin panel with excellent mobile responsiveness.

Screenshot:

✅ Limitless (Premium – Material Design)

Integration Time: 1 hour 15 minutes
Difficulty: Moderate
Result: Excellent integration

Limitless represents Material Design templates. While requiring slightly more configuration due to custom components, the result was seamless integration with advanced filtering options.

Screenshot:

Integration Guidelines

You can review the integration guide and sample code snippet of the dashboards on this link.

Cost-Benefit Analysis

Traditional Hand-Coded CRUD Approach:

Development time: 40-60 hours
Developer cost (@$50/hr): $2,000-$3,000
Template cost: $0-$49
Total: $2,000-$3,049

GridPHP Integration Approach:

Integration time: 2-4 hours
Developer cost (@$50/hr): $100-$200
Template cost: $0-$49
GridPHP license: Free (or $99 Pro)
Total: $100-$348

Savings: $1,700-$2,700 per project (85-90% reduction)

Who Should Use This Approach?

Perfect For:

✅ Freelancers building client admin panels
✅ Agencies with multiple similar projects
✅ Startups needing fast MVPs
✅ Developers tired of repetitive CRUD coding
✅ Anyone who bought a template and needs backend functionality

Not Ideal For:

❌ Highly custom, unique data operations
❌ Projects requiring complex business workflows
❌ Applications with non-standard data models

Conclusion: Works with AdminLTE, CoreUI, and Any Bootstrap Template

After validating GridPHP integration with AdminLTE, CoreUI, Vuexy, SB Admin 2, Tabler, and Limitless – representing premium and free, Bootstrap 4 and 5, Material Design and standard – the conclusion is clear:

Any Bootstrap-based admin template (AdminLTE, CoreUI, Tabler, Sneat, Gentelella, Material Dashboard, Argon, Volt, and hundreds more) can be transformed into a fully functional application using the same integration pattern.

Key Takeaways:

Integration is consistently fast – 35 minutes to 1.5 hours regardless of template
The pattern is truly universal – Works with AdminLTE, Sb-Admin, Adminkit, Vuexy, Tabler, and more
No template modifications needed – Keep your template pristine
Significant ROI – 85-90% reduction in development time vs hand-coding
Production-ready – All CRUD operations work flawlessly

Your Template Will Work Too

Using AdminLTE? Sb-Admin? Tabler? Some premium ThemeForest template? It doesn’t matter. If it uses Bootstrap (3, 4, or 5), the integration pattern shown here will work.

Ready to transform your admin template?

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Hello,

In this post, we’re showing a practical example, handling data of companies with multiple business interests.

GridPHP - Handling Many to Many Relations

The Problem

You have companies. Each company has multiple interests (Software Development, Cloud Computing, etc.). Each interest can belong to multiple companies.

The traditional approach means:

3 tables with complex JOINs
Custom forms for managing relationships
Manual junction table handling
Hours of debugging

A Simpler Way

Here’s a working example using GridPHP that handles all the complexity automatically.

Database Setup

-- Three simple tables
CREATE TABLE companies (
  id int PRIMARY KEY AUTO_INCREMENT,
  name varchar(255),
  address varchar(255),
  phone varchar(15)
);

CREATE TABLE ref_interest (
  id int PRIMARY KEY AUTO_INCREMENT,
  name varchar(45)
);

CREATE TABLE company_interest (
  company_id int,
  interest_id int,
  PRIMARY KEY (company_id, interest_id)
);

The Smart Query

Instead of showing relationships in separate rows, use GROUP_CONCAT:

$g->select_command = "SELECT c.id, c.name, c.address, c.phone, 
                      GROUP_CONCAT(i.id) as interests
                      FROM companies c 
                      LEFT JOIN company_interest ci ON c.id = ci.company_id 
                      LEFT JOIN ref_interest i ON ci.interest_id = i.id 
                      GROUP BY c.id";

This displays all interests for each company in a single row.

Auto-Handle Junction Table

The key is custom handlers that manage the junction table automatically:

function update_company_interest($data) {
    global $g;

    // Update company info
    $g->execute_query("UPDATE companies SET name=?, address=?, phone=? WHERE id=?", 
                      array($data["params"]["name"], 
                            $data["params"]["address"], 
                            $data["params"]["phone"], 
                            $data["id"]));

    // Delete old relationships
    $g->execute_query("DELETE FROM company_interest WHERE company_id=?", 
                      array($data["id"]));

    // Insert new relationships
    if (!empty($data["params"]["interests"])) {
        $interest_ids = explode(",", $data["params"]["interests"]);
        foreach ($interest_ids as $interest_id) {
            $g->execute_query("INSERT INTO company_interest VALUES (?, ?)", 
                            array($data["id"], $interest_id));
        }
    }
}

Multi-Select Interface

Add a searchable multi-select dropdown:

$col["edittype"] = "select";
$col["editoptions"] = array(
    "value" => $g->get_dropdown_values("SELECT id, name FROM ref_interest"),
    "multiple" => true,
    "dataInit" => "function(el){ 
        jQuery(el).select2({tags:true}); 
    }"
);

The Result

Users see a grid with companies and their interests. When editing:

Click edit on any row
Multi-select dropdown appears with search
Select/deselect interests
Save – junction table updates automatically

Time saved: 3 days → 1 hour

GridPHP - Handling Many to Many Relations

Use This Pattern For:

Users ↔ Roles
Products ↔ Categories
Students ↔ Courses
Posts ↔ Tags

Complete Code

Full working example: GitHub Gist

Bottom line: Many-to-many relationships don’t need to be complicated. Use GROUP_CONCAT for display, custom handlers for the junction table, and a multi-select UI for user-friendly management.

Have a many-to-many challenge? This pattern works for any scenario with 3 tables and complex relationships.

Next Actions

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