
Show HN: Administrate – Rails framework for creating flexible admin dashboards - joncalhoun
https://robots.thoughtbot.com/announcing-administrate
======
urs2102
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!

~~~
KurtMueller
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 :).

~~~
silversmith
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 :)

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

------
bshimmin
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.

~~~
seivan
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](http://activeadmin.info/docs/documentation.html)

~~~
bshimmin
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...

------
fareesh
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!

------
amatriain
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.

~~~
Croaky
Sorry about that! Working on the ILIKE fix at
[https://github.com/thoughtbot/administrate/pull/166](https://github.com/thoughtbot/administrate/pull/166)

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

------
meesterdude
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.

------
NicoJuicy
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!

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

Nitpick: These are admin interfaces. NOT dashboards.

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

------
dublinclontarf
How does this compare to ActiveAdmin?

~~~
thirdsun
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.

~~~
seivan
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?

~~~
jurre
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.

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

Fair enough!

------
uberneo
Nice simple CRUD app, good job

------
hajrice
Looks pretty cool!

------
xyzing
awesome :)

