Administrate VS devise_masquerade

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/

There's a Devise plugin to help you do this (without needing a user's password; instead you'd want/need to have some concept of an admin user and maybe an admin backend to add the masquerade/impersonation links to): https://github.com/oivoodoo/devise_masquerade

I'm going to leave this here https://github.com/oivoodoo/devise_masquerade/issues/82

Alongside this, devise_masquerade is a fantastic plugin to use with your admin area, allowing you to login as other users. This is helpful for debugging account specific issues etc.