
Puffer - A Rails 3.1 Admin Interface - swink
https://github.com/puffer/puffer
======
gregwebs
Rails admins can be put into 2 categories- generators, and frameworks.
Generators give you ultimate control to change anything that was generated.
However, a generator works for only what you have at the time you run the
generator, and take a lot of work to adapt to changes and additions.
Frameworks adapt well to changes but limit your flexibility. They have their
own special API you have to learn, and the API will always be limited.

    
    
      * Generators - padrino admin, the many rails generators, ?
      * Frameworks - rails_admin, ActiveAdmin, admin_assistant
    

I like Puffer. I view it as exactly the same as admin_assistant, which has
more features. admin_assistant is designed for ActiveRecord though, and most
of the Puffer functionality works out of the box for Mongoid.

The reason to prefer admin_assistant or Puffer is additional flexibility.

All admins work with fairly well with your existing models. The flexibility
issue comes in changing how the controller and views behaved. The advantage of
admin_assistant in comparison to rails_admin is that you are in charge of
creating the controllers. Your controller inherits default behavior from
admin_assistant. The default works well. But when you need customisation that
your admin can't provide you can always just override the controller method.
You can also achieve something similar to to this with one of the CRUD gems
like inheritable_resource and some other techniques for automating the views.
But an admin like admin_assistant comes with all that setup, plus some extra
goodies like searching built in.

~~~
clyfe
ActiveScaffold is the lost art of administry. I found no other plugin to mach
it in terms of features, instant gratification, configurability, code
modularity etc. Volker made a titanic job porting to rails 3 (in production on
my project), and now official branch is also pushing to rails 3. Only downside
is a hard learning curve (ironically it does nothing special other than you
usually code Rails apps, just injects methods in controllers and a few other
nuts and bolts)

Also see: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2546199>

I find admin_assistant to be similar to AS but does not compare in terms of
features/customizability. I wouldn't call them "generators" more like "code
injectors", code that you can override (a natural thing in OOP).

Another big + for AS is the plethora of plugins/bridges (that also have the
same philosophy of instant gratification):

<https://github.com/vhochstein>

[https://github.com/vhochstein/active_scaffold/tree/master/li...](https://github.com/vhochstein/active_scaffold/tree/master/lib/active_scaffold/bridges)

For example add CanCan to Gemfile, define abilities and BAM - user are
restricted accordingly.

Shameless plug: CanCan bridge and a few others are contributed by yours truly.

Oh, and it's also highly documented (thanks Sergio & team)
<https://github.com/activescaffold/active_scaffold/wiki>

Anyway, Puffer looks nice.

~~~
gregwebs
looks great- actually looks about exactly the same as admin_assitant/Puffer,
just more featureful and well documented (compared to Puffer). Ironically I
passed it by because it had Scaffold in the name so I thought it was a
generator just like Rails scaffolding. Unfortunately I don't see any signs of
Mongoid support.

------
josegonzalez
Not for nothing, but projects like these need screenshots.

~~~
lucisferre
And at least one line saying why the author thought this was needed. There are
already a couple of these. I'm using RailsAdmin and I have to admin it is way
more slick than I would have expected. It would be pretty hard, not to mention
unnecessary, to build a replacement right now.

~~~
oscardelben
you have to admit.

------
zapnap
Another option is <http://github.com/jeffrafter/simple_admin>

Was originally a modified (ahem, simplified) version of ActiveAdmin, but has
grown quite a bit since then.

------
BenSchaechter
I find <http://activeadmin.info/> to be a much more effective solution.

~~~
boundlessdreamz
ActiveAdmin is quite flexible, userfriendly and has a sexy UI. From looking at
<http://puffer.heroku.com/admin/> I don't see any improvement at least in the
UI part.

