[LRUG] Experiences using RailsAdmin vs ActiveAdmin

[Murray Steele]

If this is a throwaway tool that you won't be working on and ActiveAdmin or
RailsAdmin get you there super fast then I'd use them.  However, if it's
something that you will be working on later I'd go custom all the way.
 Sure it'll take you a bit longer, but you'll get a much nicer system that
you know how to customise later.

I don't have any experience of ActiveAdmin or RailsAdmin (maybe I've
watched a Railscast about them), but judging by what you've pasted in below
I'd steer well clear.

As an aside, I often see the CMS part of an app getting the least love and
yet it's the bit that the people paying for the app use all the time!  I
think it's worth spending at least as much time on the CMS as you do on the
public-facing side.

On 20 March 2012 17:30, Tom Blomfield <tom at gocardless.com> wrote:

>  For example, to customise User index, our code looks like this
>
>     index do
>       id_column
>       column("Join Date", :created_at)
>       column(:email)
>       column("Name")      { |user| "#{user.first_name} #{user.last_name}" }
>       column("Status")    { |user| status_tag user.status.to_s,
> ACTIVE_ADMIN_STATUS[user.status] }
>       column("Actions") do |user|
>  # ActiveAdmin only pays attention to the return value of the block
>         "
>         #{link_to "Bills", admin_bills_path(:q => {:limit_user_id_eq =>
> user.id} )}
>         #{link_to "Limits", admin_limits_path(:q => {:user_id_eq =>
> user.id} )}
>         #{link_to "Payments", admin_payments_path(:q => {:user_id_eq =>
> user.id})}
>         ".html_safe
>       end
>     end
>
> Maybe we're doing it wrong, but ActiveAdmin seems to encourage you to mix
> up routing, controllers & views.
>
> --
> Tom Blomfield
> +44 7767 484619
>
> gocardless.com
>
> On Tuesday, 20 March 2012 at 17:19, Mark Burns wrote:
>
> How does it crap over MVC? Could you elaborate? We are literally just
> looking at using it now.
> I guess it's maybe about as useful as scaffold.
>
> On 20 March 2012 17:13, Tom Blomfield <tom at gocardless.com> wrote:
>
>  We use ActiveAdmin, and it's sort of ok for basic stuff.
>
> But...
> - it craps all over MVC separation
> - it's not easily extensible
> - it can make your site run very slowly in development (although there are
> fixes for this)
> - it leads to lots of annoying conflicts with stuff like namespaced class
> definitions and STI where the sub-classes aren't present in the database.
>
> I'd really like to see a more "native" rails admin tool.
>
> --
> Tom Blomfield
> +44 7767 484619
>
> gocardless.com
>
> On Tuesday, 20 March 2012 at 17:06, Chris Adams wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> Hoping I can tap into the LRUG hive mind here, with a question others
> might find useful too - apologies if it's come up already in the last
> couple of months.
>
> We're developing a project at work which looks like it'll need some
> kind of admin-dashboard for privileged users to sign in and see
> various in-app metrics, like how many users are in the system, or how
> many performed a specific action, and so on.
>
> Now, my preferred approach here I would be to look at which gems I
> could use as a starting point for something like this - and the two
> best options look to be either ActiveAdmin, and RailsAdmin.
>
> They both give nice looking admin interfaces, without needing to go
> spelunking through loads of code to deliver useful features, but I'd
> love to hear which ones you guys have used in your own projects.
>
> Reading this post here suggests that ActiveAdmin may be a better
> choice in the long run on projects where you can't predict what a
> product owner would want to measure.
>
>
> http://batsov.com/articles/2011/11/20/admin-interfaces-for-rails-apps-railsadmin-vs-activeadmin/
>
> For my part, I've used RailsAdmin on a couple of projects, pretty much
> using it out of the box, and I've been amazed at how much you get for
> free, but pages like this when trying to understand the structure of
> the project make me wary about trying to customise it:
>
>
> https://github.com/sferik/rails_admin/wiki/Code-Architecture-For-Contributors
>
> How about you guys?
>
> Have you had good experiences building your own dashboards in RailsAdmin?
>
> Or if I'm about to invest a chunk of time building a dashboard where
> I'll most likely add my own screens, is it a better idea to just dive
> into ActiveAdmin instead?
>
> Ta
>
> Chris
>
> --
> Chris Adams
> mob: 07974 368 229
> tel: 0207 558 8971
> skype: chris.d.adams
> twitter: mrchrisadams
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