Pull in Viget posts

content/elsewhere/rails-admin-interface-generators/index.md

@@ -0,0 +1,96 @@
+---
+title: "Rails Admin Interface Generators"
+date: 2011-05-31T00:00:00+00:00
+draft: false
+needs_review: true
+canonical_url: https://www.viget.com/articles/rails-admin-interface-generators/
+---
+
+Here at Viget, we're always looking for ways to reduce duplicated
+effort, and one component that nearly every single one of our
+applications needs is an admin interface. As such, we've spent a lot of
+time trying to find the perfect drop-in admin interface generator. We've
+been happy with [Typus](https://github.com/fesplugas/typus) for the past
+year or two and have been able to contribute back to the project on a
+[number](https://github.com/fesplugas/typus/commit/3fb53f58ce606ae80beaa712eef81dcf0d6b03bc)
+[of](https://github.com/fesplugas/typus/commit/b6ead488b218d187f948e85ec70c3b01a589ebae)
+[occasions](https://github.com/fesplugas/typus/commit/00b7b47ebd97a630623e80c006ef5401060bd848).
+Lately, though, a pair of new libraries have been making some noise:
+[ActiveAdmin](http://activeadmin.info/) and
+[RailsAdmin](https://github.com/sferik/rails_admin). How do they stack
+up to Typus? Read on, friend.
+
+### Typus
+
+[Typus](https://github.com/fesplugas/typus) is a library by Francesc
+Esplugas originally started in 2007. Typus takes a different approach
+than the other two libraries in that it uses generated controllers that
+live in your Rails app to serve up its pages, rather than keeping all of
+its application code within the library. This approach offers (in this
+author's opinion) increased extensibility at the expense of code
+duplication --- it's dirt simple to override the (e.g.) `create` action
+in your `Admin::CommentsController` when the need arises, but you'll
+still need a separate controller for every model where the default
+behavior is good enough.
+
+Installing Typus is very straightforward: add the gem to your Gemfile,
+bundle it, run `rails generate typus` to get a basic admin interface up,
+then run `rails generate typus:migration` to get user authentication.
+The authors of the plugin recently fixed one of my biggest gripes,
+adding generators to make adding new admin controllers a snap.
+Configuration is all handled by a few YAML files. In terms of looks,
+Typus isn't going to win any awards out of the box, but they've made it
+very simple to copy the views into your app's `views/` folder, where
+you're free to override them.
+
+### ActiveAdmin
+
+I just heard about [ActiveAdmin](http://activeadmin.info/) from Peter
+Cooper's [Ruby Weekly](http://rubyweekly.com/) newsletter, though the
+project was started in April 2010. Before anything else, you have to
+admit that the project homepage looks pretty nice, and I'm happy to
+report that that same attention to aesthetics carries into the project
+itself. Configuration files for each model in the admin interface are
+written in Ruby and live in `app/admin`. It's clear that a lot of
+thought has gone into the configuration API, and the [Github
+page](https://github.com/gregbell/active_admin) contains thorough
+documentation for how to use it.
+
+I've long been jealous of [Django](https://www.djangoproject.com/)'s
+generated admin interfaces, and ActiveAdmin is the first Rails project
+I've seen that can rival it in terms of overall slickness, both from a
+UI and development standpoint. The trouble with libraries that give you
+so much out of the box is that it's often difficult to do things that
+the author's didn't anticipate, and I'd need to spend more than an hour
+with ActiveAdmin in order to determine if that's the case here.
+
+### RailsAdmin
+
+[RailsAdmin](https://github.com/sferik/rails_admin) is another recent
+entry into the admin interface generator space, beginning as a Ruby
+Summer of Code project in August of last year. I had some difficulty
+getting it installed, finally having success after pointing the Gemfile
+entry at the GitHub repository
+(`gem 'rails_admin', :git => 'git://github.com/sferik/rails_admin.git'`).
+The signup process was similarly unpolished, outsourcing entirely to
+[Devise](https://github.com/plataformatec/devise) to the point that
+anyone can navigate to `/users/sign_up` in your application and become
+an admin.
+
+Once inside the admin interface, things seem to work pretty well.
+There's some interesting functionality available for associating models,
+and the dashboard has some neat animated graphs. I'll be curious to
+watch this project as it develops --- if they can smooth off some of the
+rough edges, I think they'll really have something.
+
+### Conclusion
+
+[ActiveAdmin](http://activeadmin.info/) offers an incredibly slick
+out-of-the-box experience; [Typus](https://github.com/fesplugas/typus)
+seems to offer more ways to override default behavior. If I was starting
+a new project today, it would depend on how much customization I thought
+I'd have to do through the life of the project as to which library I
+would choose. I put a small project called
+[rails_admin_interfaces](https://github.com/dce/rails_admin_interfaces)
+on GitHub with branches for each of these libraries so you can try them
+out and draw your own conclusions.