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> The other glaring omission being an inbuilt admin interface -- which may have been added after I moved on. with scaffolding and other rails generators with c

> The other glaring omission being an inbuilt admin interface -- which may have been added after I moved on. with scaffolding and other rails generators with custom templates is that really a big asset? might not look amazing out of the box but you can find css templates easy enough too. maybe they should make an admin generator but rails is king of crud and if you need it ootb you can use one of the many gems.

ethagnawl 2y ago
I think so. You could also make that same argument about the new authentication feature, ActionStorage/Jobs/whatever. Yes, of course, _there's a gem for that_ but after having used Django, it's really very nice to have those features included and not have to spend any time thinking/arguing about which Gem to choose and remembering/endeavoring to keep that Gem patched, etc.
- weaksauce 2y ago
  there's also administration-zero which is basically scaffolding for admin pages and would be similar to what they'd give you built in if they were to. they consider it outside the scope of rails' responsibility as scaffolding is so easy to make. administration zero doesn't do much other than install a few gems, and include a scaffold that you can use to generate admin pages akin to django but you do get pagination and search and filters added on top. no magic though just rails scaffolds. https://github.com/lazaronixon/administration-zero https://github.com/lazaronixon/administration-zero
- krschacht 2y ago
  I agree this is something missing. I wish the framework had it. I bookmarked this to try out soon: https://github.com/igorkasyanchuk/rails_db https://github.com/igorkasyanchuk/rails_db I know there are a few other projects like this which I’ve seen over the years, but I’ve yet to truly investigate any.
FigurativeVoid 2y ago
I was going to write about more things that I want, but it didn’t feel like it fit so much. I would love a basic admin interface plus some auth. It would be cool if rails mirrored some Devise helpers so that Pundit/Cancancan worked out of the box.
- weaksauce 2y ago
  try out https://github.com/lazaronixon/administration-zero https://github.com/lazaronixon/administration-zero just a thing to install an admin generator scaffolds which you control fully after the fact. no magic just generators.
sroerick 2y ago
Django admin is particularly fantastic in the first 100 hours of a project. I think it offers a lot of the same developer experience and convenience that the rails generators do, though obviously in a different way.
- weaksauce 2y ago
  I'm looking at the django admin interface and I see a very superficial admin interface. I am not sure why it's so lauded when the rails scaffold gives you 90% of that out of the box albeit in a style neutral way which is easy enough to gemify. are aesthetics what people are so craving for this? there's no search. nothing that stands out as a killer admin panel. I used to program django professionally around 2007ish and it doesn't seem like much has changed with the admin site... am i wrong?
  - sroerick 2y ago
    No, I don’t think so. It’s just a preference thing. I think that the rails scaffolding is definitely comparable. For most apps in Django I ultimately move away from admin in production towards custom views. There is a search fields feature, which I use frequently, but it might not do what you’re looking for. I think user permissioning and the audit trail are pretty useful in the early stages of an app. At the end of the day, crud is crud, and if you have a workflow that works for you nothing the admin panel offers is going to save you all that much time. Rails scaffolding is a similar way. It’s just one workflow. I’m doing a side project in Go right now, which is decidedly not “batteries included”, and I love it. Go and htmx are kind of a match made in heaven. That doesn’t mean I think Django Admin or Rails Scaffolding are useless, they’re just a convenience. I rolled my own login system, cause it’s fun. Is Django user land or Devise more secure? Absolutely. Is it necessary for what I’m doing? Nope. My personal preference is that if I’m doing app design or consumer facing work, Rails seems stronger. For internal tooling, data analysis work, or geospatial work, I reach to Django to have those Python libraries available.
  - Lutger 2y ago
    Django admin also has various ways of filtering, search, navigation including menu's, pagination, permissions, custom actions and change tracking out of the box. Most importantly, it also includes ways to easily deal with relations (inline admins). Last time I programmed with rails was many years ago, but none of these things are included in the default scaffolds right? I understand the comparison with scaffolding, but I don't think they really overlap too much. You'd typically throw away a lot of the generated scaffolds from rails for a production app. They are more of a tool to avoid having to manually write boilerplate code, increasing productivity and (maybe) reducing errors. But django admin interface is meant for production, though often more as a backend tool than a customer facing interface. Different purposed. I miss the scaffolding in django and the admin interface in rails.
Lutger 2y ago
> with scaffolding and other rails generators with custom templates is that really a big asset? Yes, it is. Django CMS just hits that sweet spot where you can do almost everything you need for an administrative backend with very little customization. Because there is a convention of how things hang together, you are that much more productive. Its kind of a cms that you can throw together programmatically, it sits at a higher level than scaffolding + templates. Honestly it feels, ironically, like a very rails-like thing to do (here's my model, you know all about it: now generate an admin interface for it!), except that in the rails world it would be unacceptably ugly (in various ways). But it is this very ugliness that prevents you from exposing it to consumers, or spending more time on it that it really needs, so it tends to stay in that sweet spot of being just good enough to do its job. It is very pragmatic and effective. Is it a must-have? No, of course not. You can DIY an admin interface with rails very easily, too easily almost. However, the same thing can be said about pretty much anything that rails has got going for it: you can DIY in django/python too. And there is always a package...

ethagnawl 2y ago

I think so. You could also make that same argument about the new authentication feature, ActionStorage/Jobs/whatever. Yes, of course, _there's a gem for that_ but after having used Django, it's really very nice to have those features included and not have to spend any time thinking/arguing about which Gem to choose and remembering/endeavoring to keep that Gem patched, etc.

weaksauce 2y ago
there's also administration-zero which is basically scaffolding for admin pages and would be similar to what they'd give you built in if they were to. they consider it outside the scope of rails' responsibility as scaffolding is so easy to make. administration zero doesn't do much other than install a few gems, and include a scaffold that you can use to generate admin pages akin to django but you do get pagination and search and filters added on top. no magic though just rails scaffolds. https://github.com/lazaronixon/administration-zero https://github.com/lazaronixon/administration-zero
krschacht 2y ago
I agree this is something missing. I wish the framework had it. I bookmarked this to try out soon: https://github.com/igorkasyanchuk/rails_db https://github.com/igorkasyanchuk/rails_db I know there are a few other projects like this which I’ve seen over the years, but I’ve yet to truly investigate any.

FigurativeVoid 2y ago

I was going to write about more things that I want, but it didn’t feel like it fit so much. I would love a basic admin interface plus some auth. It would be cool if rails mirrored some Devise helpers so that Pundit/Cancancan worked out of the box.

weaksauce 2y ago
try out https://github.com/lazaronixon/administration-zero https://github.com/lazaronixon/administration-zero just a thing to install an admin generator scaffolds which you control fully after the fact. no magic just generators.

sroerick 2y ago

Django admin is particularly fantastic in the first 100 hours of a project. I think it offers a lot of the same developer experience and convenience that the rails generators do, though obviously in a different way.

weaksauce 2y ago
I'm looking at the django admin interface and I see a very superficial admin interface. I am not sure why it's so lauded when the rails scaffold gives you 90% of that out of the box albeit in a style neutral way which is easy enough to gemify. are aesthetics what people are so craving for this? there's no search. nothing that stands out as a killer admin panel. I used to program django professionally around 2007ish and it doesn't seem like much has changed with the admin site... am i wrong?
- sroerick 2y ago
  No, I don’t think so. It’s just a preference thing. I think that the rails scaffolding is definitely comparable. For most apps in Django I ultimately move away from admin in production towards custom views. There is a search fields feature, which I use frequently, but it might not do what you’re looking for. I think user permissioning and the audit trail are pretty useful in the early stages of an app. At the end of the day, crud is crud, and if you have a workflow that works for you nothing the admin panel offers is going to save you all that much time. Rails scaffolding is a similar way. It’s just one workflow. I’m doing a side project in Go right now, which is decidedly not “batteries included”, and I love it. Go and htmx are kind of a match made in heaven. That doesn’t mean I think Django Admin or Rails Scaffolding are useless, they’re just a convenience. I rolled my own login system, cause it’s fun. Is Django user land or Devise more secure? Absolutely. Is it necessary for what I’m doing? Nope. My personal preference is that if I’m doing app design or consumer facing work, Rails seems stronger. For internal tooling, data analysis work, or geospatial work, I reach to Django to have those Python libraries available.
- Lutger 2y ago
  Django admin also has various ways of filtering, search, navigation including menu's, pagination, permissions, custom actions and change tracking out of the box. Most importantly, it also includes ways to easily deal with relations (inline admins). Last time I programmed with rails was many years ago, but none of these things are included in the default scaffolds right? I understand the comparison with scaffolding, but I don't think they really overlap too much. You'd typically throw away a lot of the generated scaffolds from rails for a production app. They are more of a tool to avoid having to manually write boilerplate code, increasing productivity and (maybe) reducing errors. But django admin interface is meant for production, though often more as a backend tool than a customer facing interface. Different purposed. I miss the scaffolding in django and the admin interface in rails.

Lutger 2y ago

> with scaffolding and other rails generators with custom templates is that really a big asset? Yes, it is. Django CMS just hits that sweet spot where you can do almost everything you need for an administrative backend with very little customization. Because there is a convention of how things hang together, you are that much more productive. Its kind of a cms that you can throw together programmatically, it sits at a higher level than scaffolding + templates. Honestly it feels, ironically, like a very rails-like thing to do (here's my model, you know all about it: now generate an admin interface for it!), except that in the rails world it would be unacceptably ugly (in various ways). But it is this very ugliness that prevents you from exposing it to consumers, or spending more time on it that it really needs, so it tends to stay in that sweet spot of being just good enough to do its job. It is very pragmatic and effective. Is it a must-have? No, of course not. You can DIY an admin interface with rails very easily, too easily almost. However, the same thing can be said about pretty much anything that rails has got going for it: you can DIY in django/python too. And there is always a package...