Active Admin - The missing administration framework for Ruby on Rails

by gregbell • 15 years ago

190 40 15 years ago

pcreux4• 15 years ago

Awesome!

msbarnett• 15 years ago

For future reference, you're being downvoted because Hacker News has traditionally looked down upon non-contributive, vacuous one-word comments. Particularly if they looked like they're coming from new accounts to try to boost the article's ranking.

Since you appear to be one of the developers on this project, I think it would have been better received if you had introduced yourself as such.

pcreux4• 15 years ago

Oh... Ok, I will introduce myself before saying that Active Admin is awesome from now on.

nikdotca• 15 years ago

The code is as beautiful as the interface.

charlesju• 15 years ago

This is amazing thanks! How similar is this to the Django admin panel?

gregbell3• 15 years ago

It's very similar. Internally, its taking a different approach, but in the end, the goals of the projects are fairly close.

Active Admin provides similar features, but does so with a DSL instead of implementing classes, as is the case with Django Admin.

cynusx• 15 years ago

This is way better than ActiveScaffold ever was! awesome.

NoPiece• 15 years ago

Active Admin does look very pretty, but in defense of ActiveScaffold, it is simple, works, and is easy to set up. Being able to throw up Active Scaffold generated pages has saved me a ton of time over the last couple years.

mattvague• 15 years ago

As someone who uses this on a few of his own projects, let me just say that ActiveAdmin is a game changer.

drewda• 15 years ago

I've been having good luck with rails_admin[1], which is currently in the process of receiving a nice facelift[2].

[1] https://github.com/sferik/rails_admin/

[2] https://github.com/sferik/rails_admin/issues/317

audionerd• 15 years ago

I've been digging into RailsAdmin for a project recently as well, and really liking it so far.

A couple things I'd like to see addressed from the author:

- How is Active Admin's approach different?

- Why would someone choose Active Admin over RailsAdmin?

marcamillion• 15 years ago

I would love to know what the differences are too. Although, to be honest, I have stopped using RailsAdmin mainly because of deprecation issues.

Also, it wasn't as nice as I would have wanted.

But this one looks really nice.

gregbell3• 15 years ago

That's a great question and something I plan on writing a full blog post about. But, from a high level, here are the projet goals we've been working with:

1. An administration interface must be good looking and easy to use. The interface is not for developers who understand the underlying data model, rather for operations staff who need to do their job and service our customers.

2. Administration of a production application is way more complex than a simple CRUD of database tables. Although editing data is necessary, most of the time operations staff are finding a resource and performing an action on it or looking up historical data.

3. An administration framework must be highly customizable. Active Admin makes it easy to add controller actions, sidebar elements, action buttons, dashboard widgets, custom forms, show screens and hook in to all resources via plugins.

kaylarose• 15 years ago

Right now it looks* like rails_admin is a bit more feature complete as far as CRUD administration goes (+ history of edits). While ActiveRails has feature like comments which may be more relevant to less technical users.

* Disclaimer: I'm more familiar (and probably biased) with rails_admin

jschuur4• 15 years ago

Kudos to the developer for having a nicely presented web site for the project too, and not just a github repo. All too often, a lot of awesome projects hide on github without some upfront presentation of the work beyond a short README file.

The developer will know why their work is great and how it can help others, but you have to make it easy to recognize for the uninitiated too. That still applies for technical projects that are going to require advanced programming efforts to integrate anyway. Don't think of it as marketing, think of it as a necessary step to evangelizing your work and bringing its benefits to a wider audience.

acangiano• 15 years ago

> think of it as a necessary step to evangelizing your work and bringing its benefits to a wider audience.

Which is marketing. A very good thing if done right, despite how some developers instinctually feel about it.

jschuur4• 15 years ago

True. For cynical people and coders used to a corporate environment, 'markting' is often something which overhypes a product, or makes promises in a sales situation that they then have to put up with and develop.

Whatever it's called, marketing isn't just something for companies, large or small. It can apply to single developers, who simply want to make sure all the hard work put into a project ends being worth it, because other developers benefited from your code.

ryanlchan• 15 years ago

I honestly expected to pay for this until I hit 'Get the code' and saw a github page. Simply making the website aesthetically pleasing increased my willingness to download and pay by an order of magnitude.

Even now I'm looking for a donate button.

jarin• 15 years ago

Looks like I'm going to have to break up with Typus.

We had a long run, Typus, no regrets…

stackus• 15 years ago

There seems to be some layout issues in Firefox 4 (Mac OS).

pcreux4• 15 years ago

Thanks for your comment! I've just created an issue for this. We'll fix it shortly. https://github.com/gregbell/active_admin/issues/22

jkahn• 15 years ago

Wow that looks amazing? I was looking for a "pricing" info page. The fact this is free - incredible.

Dobbs• 15 years ago

Slightly off topic but does anyone know what the color scheme is for the code examples?

gregbell3• 15 years ago

It's a slightly modified version of the Monokai theme.

gourneau• 15 years ago

Beautiful. I want as much of this lovely style to be converted to the Django admin page!

arturadib• 15 years ago

This reminds me of a recent research I've done on admin user interfaces in general. This one looks pretty spiffy, but there are good alternatives if you don't necessarily need the full framework. Here are some leads I've found:

https://github.com/pilu/web-app-theme

http://guitemplates.com/

http://www.uitemplates.com/

http://webguitemplates.com/

http://www.webappers.com/2009/09/18/20-professional-web-admi...

pbreit• 15 years ago

They all seem too "thick". I guess they might work if I was starting from scratch but they look like a pain to migrate to. Has anyone come up with something much leaner?

briandoll• 15 years ago

Nice to see the New Relic graph build in there, too!

pcreux4• 15 years ago

Thanks! It was just a matter of 4 lines of code: https://github.com/gregbell/activeadmin-store/commit/5922d4f... NewRelic did a really good job on that one!

esmevane• 15 years ago

Thanks for posting this.

There was a lot of care in delivering this product. As others have pointed out, this is so compellingly done that you could legitimately expect to pay for it. But no, it's open sourced - thank you very much for that.

I definitely now have plans to incorporate this as an experiment in the next application I cook up. Excited to have an option available which can reduce admin development time dramatically, freeing me up to worry almost entirely on UX and front functionality.

hiroprot• 15 years ago

I wish this worked with MongoID :(

stretchwithme• 15 years ago

Well done. Slight perception of Rails lacking something when compared to Django erased.

picardo• 15 years ago

Does this support MongoDB?

geeksean• 15 years ago

Does it support admin roles or authorization (probably via CanCan)?

trungonnews• 15 years ago

How does this stack up against Typus?

I remember some time ago, ActiveScaffold was the king of admin tools... Now I can hardly keep up with the new name for these admin projects.

phatbyte• 15 years ago

This was one of the Rails weaknesses when compared to Django . Glad to see it's available now as well.

Active Admin - The missing administration framework for Ruby on Rails

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