Active Admin - The missing administration framework for Ruby on Rails

[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.

[ryanlchan]

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.

[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.

[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?

[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.

[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.

[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...

[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?

[mattvague]

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

[jkahn]

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

[stretchwithme]

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

[nikdotca]

The code is as beautiful as the interface.

[jarin]

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

We had a long run, Typus, no regrets…

[picardo]

Does this support MongoDB?

[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.

[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

[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.

[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... NewRelic did a really good job on that one!

[phatbyte]

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

[gourneau]

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

[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.

[geeksean]

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

[hiroprot]

I wish this worked with MongoID :(