Active Admin - The missing administration framework for Ruby on Rails | Hacker News Reader

Active Admin - The missing administration framework for Ruby on Rails

activeadmin.info

190 pointsgregbell40 comments

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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...

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?

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

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

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

The code is as beautiful as the interface.

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

We had a long run, Typus, no regrets…

Does this support MongoDB?

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.

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

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

This is way better than ActiveScaffold ever was! awesome.

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.

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

I wish this worked with MongoID :(

Awesome!

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.

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

As I've painfully discovered myself, being humorous, especially sarcastic or filled with dry humor often attracts downvotes too, no matter how funny you thought the joke was.

I fully understand and agree with the rationale, hartror. It's just a little difficult to reign myself in and exercise the kind of self control needed here. But the inevitable and swift downvotes I've gotten certain helped to drive the point home.

I need some kind of Chrome extension that injects a confirmation dialog box that asks 'Are you trying to be funny?' before I post to HN.

The idea is that there are plenty of other places[1][2] to be humourous on the interwebs. By coming down hard on the few instances that are posted it stops entire threads turning into just these amusing but ultimately unproductive comments.

[1] http://www.reddit.com

[2] http://slashdot.org

edw519 regularly says something laugh-out-loud funny that also helps the conversation along, and scores a bunch of points. Other people often say things that are only slightly funny and have no other value to them, and score a bunch of negative points.

Funny and contributing = upvoted Not funny and contributing = upvoted Funny and not contributing = downvoted Not funny and not contributing = downvoted

Don't make the mistake of thinking funny/not funny is the deciding factor.

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