14 ms·
This looks really good. So a bit of insight from a dinosaur, I'm one of those guys who is a diehard ActiveAdmin user. I've come and gone through the other admi
by irjustin 4y ago
This looks really good.
So a bit of insight from a dinosaur, I'm one of those guys who is a diehard ActiveAdmin user. I've come and gone through the other admin interfaces and nothing is as fast as ActiveAdmin when it comes to the basics.
Important note is ActiveAdmin is for internal/staff only.
Benefits
- It doesn't need to be pretty. It simply needs to function.
- Layout actually should be allowed to be information dense. Less whitespace (i.e. not bootstrap).
- DSL of ActiveAdmin is TERRIBLE, but once you learn the DSL, spinning up a page to edit an object is insanely fast because of it.
- Changes to objects are typically one liners.
- Escape hatches make everything else possible, but it's not intuitive at all.
Difficulties of ActiveAdmin
- Adding Wizards, step-by-step, pages is pretty annoying
- Polymorphic relationships aren't intuitive.
- Learning how to carry the page's context to use arb takes some time.
- Customizing f.input is annoying and doesn't make sense.
- Doesn't play well with bootstrap nor modals.
In the end the difficulties are worth the problems because the time benefit is so high. It's measured in how much time our engineers spend working inside of ActiveAdmin. It's very low compared to other areas.
In the past, I've been stuck fighting React, or doing too much boiler plate.
- adrianthedev 4y agoThank you for this thorough description! I'll keep an eye out for the shortcomings so they don't creep into Avo. I'd love it if you'd try Avo for a project (not just for 30 minutes) and compare the two. I think having an experienced developer on a real project would yield a real comparison.