[LRUG] Experiences using RailsAdmin vs ActiveAdmin

Wed Mar 21 02:41:58 PDT 2012

If you're on Rails 3.1, try dobro, which I just quietly switched to
"public" on GitHub:

https://github.com/hypertiny/dobro

It was designed by twitter.com/flngn and built by twitter.com/pat, who
also built https://github.com/freelancing-god/combustion in the
process for testing Rails engines.

We've been using it quite successfully for the last 4-5 months.

—P

On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 8:13 AM, Riccardo Tacconi <rtacconi at gmail.com> wrote:
> I use the same tools as Gerhard and the scaffold generator can generate a
> CRUD interface, with the difference that Rails code is just code and can be
> customised easily.
>
>
> On 21 March 2012 00:56, Gerhard Lazu <gerhard at lazu.co.uk> wrote:
>>
>> I gave ActiveAdmin a proper go last summer, you'll end up battling with it
>> for anything custom. Devise and CanCan integration was such a pain!
>>
>> You will have more luck with Twitter's Bootstrap and Jose Valim's
>> inherited_resources and his other plugins (has_scope, simple_form etc).
>>
>> Gerhard
>>
>> ________________________________
>> Twitter Github Blog
>>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 5:30 PM, 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
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Chat mailing list
>>> Chat at lists.lrug.org
>>> http://lists.lrug.org/listinfo.cgi/chat-lrug.org
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Chat mailing list
>>> Chat at lists.lrug.org
>>> http://lists.lrug.org/listinfo.cgi/chat-lrug.org
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Chat mailing list
>>> Chat at lists.lrug.org
>>> http://lists.lrug.org/listinfo.cgi/chat-lrug.org
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Chat mailing list
>>> Chat at lists.lrug.org
>>> http://lists.lrug.org/listinfo.cgi/chat-lrug.org
>>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Chat mailing list
>> Chat at lists.lrug.org
>> http://lists.lrug.org/listinfo.cgi/chat-lrug.org
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Riccardo Tacconi
> Ruby on Rails and PHP development - System Administration
> VIRTUELOGIC LIMITED
>
> http://github.com/rtacconi
> http://riccardotacconi.blogspot.com
> http://twitter.com/rtacconi
>
> _______________________________________________
> Chat mailing list
> Chat at lists.lrug.org
> http://lists.lrug.org/listinfo.cgi/chat-lrug.org
>

-- 

Paul Campbell
paul at hypertiny.ie
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
web http://hypertiny.ie
blog http://www.pabcas.com
twitter http://www.twitter.com/paulca
github http://www.github.com/paulca
phone +353 87 914 8162
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -