Gate admin nav links by per-section permission

#15 in tonybierman/dx-blog — merged 2026-05-30

Problem

As an editor, the admin sidebar showed Dashboard, Users, and Analytics links that, when opened, errored with "error running server function: You don't have permission for this action." The sidebar gated on any admin token, so it rendered every section regardless of which capabilities the user actually held.

Changes

• Per-link gating (pages/admin/mod.rs): each sidebar link is wrapped in arium's inline PermissionGate, keyed to the exact token its page's server fns require (ANALYTICS_READ, POSTS_WRITE, MEDIA_UPLOAD, COMMENTS_MODERATE, USERS_MANAGE, SETTINGS_WRITE). The link simply doesn't render when the token is absent — no redirect.
• admin_landing() helper: returns the first sidebar section a user can open, in nav order. Single source of truth so the header link and sidebar gates can't drift.
• Header "Admin" link (layouts.rs): now targets admin_landing(...) instead of a hardcoded Dashboard, so an editor lands on Posts while a full admin still lands on Dashboard.
• Direct-nav hardening (pages/admin/dashboard.rs): the analytics-backed Dashboard/Analytics pages bounce a user without ANALYTICS_READ to their first accessible section instead of rendering the raw permission error (covers bookmarks / typed /admin).

The server fns remain the real authorization boundary; this just paints the UI to match what each user can do, using arium's membership-gate pattern rather than hand-rolled checks.

Testing

• cargo fmt
• cargo check --no-default-features --features server,sqlite
• cargo check --no-default-features --features web --target wasm32-unknown-unknown

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