Administrate VS Cells

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/

It can be used with Ruby on Rails or other frameworks because I implemented with trailblazer/cells.

I agree, though cells does still have a larger following.

Better official documentation for cells: https://trailblazer.to/2.1/docs/cells.html

So what about the world outside Rails defaults? There are quite a few independent projects trying to help build components in the Rails view layer, among the more famous being Draper (utilizing the decorators pattern) or Cells (full-featured components in views). In the end, we decided to take a deeper look into a relatively new one – the ViewComponent framework.

GitHub has recently posted an article about view_component: https://github.blog/2020-12-15-encapsulating-ruby-on-rails-views/ Before it gets too popular I think I should share my experience with cells So that developers can have another chance to re-think and pick what to use for "encapsulated view components".

This, combined with the fact that we are using cells gem for some view components, resulted in another couple of hours of hunting for the problem (it takes some time to debug what exactly and how exactly changed in Rails internals) and then fixing this problem. At this moment, I already spent over 8 hours debugging Rails internals, different gem internals, fixing application, fixing tests, screaming internally.