

Active Admin - The missing administration framework for Ruby on Rails - gregbell
http://activeadmin.info

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jschuur
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
> 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.

~~~
jschuur
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.

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drewda
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
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?

~~~
gregbell
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.

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esmevane
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.

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arturadib
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...](http://www.webappers.com/2009/09/18/20-professional-web-admin-
templates-on-themeforest/)

~~~
pbreit
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?

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

~~~
gregbell
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.

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

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

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

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nikdotca
The code is as beautiful as the interface.

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

We had a long run, Typus, no regrets…

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picardo
Does this support MongoDB?

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trungonnews
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.

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

~~~
pcreux
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>

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cynusx
This is way better than ActiveScaffold ever was! awesome.

~~~
NoPiece
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.

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

~~~
pcreux
Thanks! It was just a matter of 4 lines of code:
[https://github.com/gregbell/activeadmin-
store/commit/5922d4f...](https://github.com/gregbell/activeadmin-
store/commit/5922d4fe7fbeb7e152fecf876b7abd63d26c6e0b) NewRelic did a really
good job on that one!

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

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

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

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

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

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hiroprot
I wish this worked with MongoID :(

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pcreux
Awesome!

~~~
msbarnett
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.

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

~~~
jschuur
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.

~~~
jschuur
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.

