Administrate VS Avo

thoughtbot/administrate is a well-known framework for administrative screen, but it's not developer friendly。I implement my own template files for Administrate, so when new Administrate version released, It is hard to update Administrate because template file is changed.**

I work at thoughtbot, you might know us for our open source work like administrate, factory_bot or shoulda-matchers.

This looks very similar to Administrate by thoughtbot https://github.com/thoughtbot/administrate

We briefly considered migrating to a full-grown Rails admin interface, such as ActiveAdmin, RailsAdmin, Administrate or Avo. We especially liked Avo which is built on a very modern stack similar to ours (Tailwind + Hotwire + ViewComponents). In the end, we didn’t go this route as we found some of the options a bit too restrictive (even though Avo is very flexible) and we did not feel like trying to amend it to our needs. For example, Avo renders forms in a 1-field-per-row layout while we wanted something more similar to the Tailwind UI Stacked form layout. Nevertheless, we found a great deal of inspiration in the Avo code and its design principles.

We have already covered many use cases for customisation, everything else can be found in the official documentation.

Administrate

I usually tend to create these from Scratch, but moving forward I’ve started to use thoughtbot’s administrate gem. It sticks to the Rails conventions of controllers and routing, so it’s easy to customise and add new functionality to.

That's exactly what we do. Easy to extend trials as needed for users when needed too via https://github.com/thoughtbot/administrate

Documentation https://administrate-demo.herokuapp.com/

Avo is looking for a mid-level Ruby on Rails Developer and I could not recommend enough the experience of working with Adrian Marin - the creator of Avo.

I would recommend Ruby on Rails - you will find well establish gems for everything you need (eg: devise for auth, pay gem for paymens, sitepress for static content like marketing pages …)

There are also some very well done (simple to understand and maintain) starter kits. Here are two of them:

- https://jumpstartrails.com

- https://businessclasskit.com

I would recommend Avo (and I am doing so for a couple of projects) as a super great admin to manage everything:

- https://avohq.io

Quality is often much better with these kinds of templates and frameworks, because the creators often can make better default choices.

For example, Avo (https://avohq.io) and Bullet Train (https://bullettrain.co/) are IMHO both much higher quality out of the box than what a typical intermediate Rails developer could accomplish in months of full time learning and coding.

<%= link_to(@car) do %> <%= @car.name %> -- Check this car! <% end %> cars/1"> Tesla -- Check this car! <%= link_to "https://avohq.io/" do %> AvoHQ - The Best Rails Guide <% end %> https://avohq.io/"> AvoHQ - The Best Rails Guide

Access the Avo, and click on Sign Up. After completing registration, click on your profile icon and select Subscriptions, then Choose a plan, choose the Pro version and click on Start 30 day trial. The system URL is not required, click Subscribe. Now you will have your key to use the Avo 2 Pro version for 30 days.

But there's another alternative for Ruby on Rails. This is a shameless plug, but why don't you try Avo?

URL: https://avohq.io

Nothing really beats Rails. Use something like Jumpstart (jumpstartrails.com) and Avo (https://avohq.io) and you scaffold a full consumer-ready app in literally a few hours.

The thing that bugs me the most with Next.JS and the whole JAMStack movement is that, yeah, you get from "git clone" to deployed on Vercel in two minutes, but if you need to create real app features like a sturdy admin, accounts, authorization, proper asset management, CI/CD, it takes a whole lotta time. I'm not even touching the most common app features.