You built a SaaS. Users signed up. Now you need to actually manage them. And "manage" means a lot more than a table with an edit button.

I built Kohana.io - a production CRM/ERP for small businesses. The admin user management module turned out to be one of the most complex pieces in the system. Now I'm extracting it into LaraFoundry , an open-source SaaS framework for Laravel.

This post covers the full implementation: CRUD, banning, impersonation, activity logging, and search/filtering.

Table of Contents

CRUD Architecture

Ban System

Impersonation ("Follow")

Activity Logging

Search & Filtering

Testing

Design Decisions

CRUD Architecture

Create

User creation goes through AdminUserStoreRequest - validation happens before the controller.

Validated fields:

Required: name , email , password (with confirmation)

Optional: lastname , middlename , phone , sex , country , birth_date

Social links: array validation - URL must be valid, social network must exist in config

Password handling:

// User model…