Show HN: Administrate – Rails framework for creating flexible admin dashboards | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Administrate – Rails framework for creating flexible admin dashboards

robots.thoughtbot.com

124 pointsjoncalhoun26 comments

Thoughtbot really has some smart people who make great things. I've really liked both Hound and Formkeep (not to mention their plethora of open source projects like Suspenders, Liftoff, Paperclip, Factory Girl and more).

I always get the feeling they eat their own dog food and really like their contributions to the ruby community. Great work guys - looking forward to trying this out in a project!

Shout out to Thoughtbot, a company who has influenced my Rails development thinking, workflow, and habits.

vim-rspec in conjunction with vim-rails (by Tim Pope, not affiliated with Thoughtbot) has tightened my red-green-refactor loop. It's so nice being able to quickly iterate using this methodology and workflow.

Their weekly iteration videos (at least, the ones that delve into best practices) are great for beginner-intermediate rails developers. Any rails developer just getting started should watch the first 10 or so videos with Joe Ferris and Ben Orenstein - they're fantastic.

Finally, I really like their ruby gems. I'm always a bit weary of pulling in new gems to a project, but Thoughtbot's gems have always made my life simpler. I recently came across their nifty 'Scenic' gem which allows you to add views to your app - you write a view migration and have the view sql statement reflected in your schema. You can then access that view like any other ActiveRecord model.

Anyway, I just had to give props to Thoughtbot somewhere. Figured this HN post would be a good place to do so :).

Oh wow, Scenic looks really nice, thank you. I have a unreleased, home-made solution like that, but the gem looks much tidier. And apparently supports `change` migrations, something that has been on my to-do list for the longest time now :)

It is. It has made my app easier to work. Adding scopes onto view-backed models has been painless.

As someone who's played the "Let's use Rails Admin, it's quick and easy... <time passes> Oh hell, the client wants to see what in there now? <much more time passes, punctuated by intense pain and misery> OK, maybe just building a custom admin interface from scratch would've been easier" game more times than I'd like to admit, I'm very keen to give this a try.

The "No DSLs" principle is particularly appealing to me.

Indeed.

Interesting how the Ruby community has gone from seeing DSLs as a core virtue of Ruby to mostly a vice.

Myself I'm mostly in the anti-DSL camp. I'd usually rather just deal with plain Ruby even if it's more verbose.

I think it depends on the DSL (and perhaps what you're doing with it, perhaps not). I love RSpec's, I don't much like RailsAdmin's.

I take it you've had a bad experience with ActiveAdmin?

Even with its "DSL" (I wouldn't call it a DSL) it's pretty customisable and can do pretty much anything brought up in the article here http://activeadmin.info/docs/documentation.html

RailsAdmin's "automatic" nature is a big win for us, whereas with ActiveAdmin we would have to write some code (even if it is easy code) to get us to the same point. For some of our projects RailsAdmin in its default state does the job excellently, without any fiddling; for other projects it starts out well and then goes downhill from there...

I have immense respect for the team at thoughtbot for building all of these incredibly useful gems for the ruby community. As an aside, the thoughtbot playbook is a fantastic read for anyone starting out in the development industry - I was very pleased to read through it one day and find that it validated every practice we ended up following. Really keen on checking out this latest project and submitting a few pull requests!

The search feature currently only works on Postgres. It builds an SQL sentence with an ILIKE clause, for case-insensitive matching, which I think is valid only in Postgres. It's not a huge problem for me, but I'd like having full SQLite support for when I'm in development mode.

They said they will work on a connector architecture to support other RDBMS, I hope it's not too difficult.

It looks nicer and is more easily configurable than ActiveAdmin. For simple CRUD it's probably the best admin gem I've seen. However I usually build moderately complex dashboards in ActiveAdmin (things like "show me lists with the 10 oldest open tickets and the 10 unassigned tickets with the highest priority"), and I'm not sure how would one replicate this in Administrate.

Sorry about that! Working on the ILIKE fix at https://github.com/thoughtbot/administrate/pull/166

It works in SQLite now. I'll wait for the next release. Thanks!

Awesome work! very clean and simple UI. I'll have to checkout how it fairs in production, but it sounds leaner than ActiveAdmin and more naturally customizable.

My one complaint about thoughtbot is that they can be slow in responding to PR's and issues; So if you submit to the project, don't be surprised if you wait 9 months to hear back about it. It might just be dependent on who the project lead is, so YMMV.

Also, the demo doesn't render quite right in safari for me, but looks right in firefox. I'd look into fixing it, but, see above.

Still, i'm thankful these folks are still pumping out these projects; i use quite a bit of their toolkit now that I think about it.

Most of these tools miss 2 things:

- Automaticly generated API

- Image upload ( eg. as a property or productImage which is only a 1 - * relationship without meta attributes) -- now an url is used as image

It's also missing here, but other then that. This tool is very nice / easy to use!

I like this approach. RailsAdmin/ActiveAdmin never appealed to me as a good solution.

Nitpick: These are admin interfaces. NOT dashboards.

I love how people could make things better based on what exists.

How does this compare to ActiveAdmin?

It's actually explained in the post. To sum it up, this seems to be less rigid and doesn't come with a lot of expectations about your project/structure, which is nice.

However, I still think it's better to design a custom solution tailored to your very individual needs.

I didn't feel like it brought up any of the changes they wanted that ActiveAdmin couldn't solve apart from the auth-solution.

When it comes to alter anything within the MVC stack, ActiveAdmin does offer a lot. Maybe I am missing something here?

I think the issue isn't so much that you can't do this stuff with ActiveAdmin, it's more that if you want to do custom stuff, you now have to go look up how to do it in activeadmin instead of relying on your Rails knowledge.

Well explained, now that you mention it it was in their post as well and... it's actually true.

Fair enough!

Nice simple CRUD app, good job

Looks pretty cool!

awesome :)

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