Forest Admin VS decap-cms

Forest Admin is an admin panel solution that saves your back-end engineers time and gives your operational teams more autonomy. Our highly customizable admin panel connects to your databases and APIs to ease your operations so that you can focus more on your business and less on backend operations.

Disclaimer: I'm the founder of Forest Admin.

I couldn't agree more with this statement. The issue isn't that internal tool builders lack a feature to do it, I think the problem is deeper and comes from the way they are designed.

Most of them allow you to build the frontend (web or mobile here) without providing any backend code. They provide you with an integration library, whether it's connecting to a third-party SaaS or to your backend code. But that's where it ends.

With [Forest Admin](https://www.forestadmin.com), we have a completely different architecture. All the backend code is automatically generated with the UI, allowing you to be up and running in a few minutes.

This has allowed us to provide a rich development workflow environment both on the backend (the code is yours and runs on your own machine, so you can use your Git without changing your habits) and on the frontend. This gives you the ability to fork a branch from your production environment to a dev environment, make your changes, merge them on a staging before pushing to prod, etc.

This command line is heavily inspired by Git but allows you to have a dev workflow that works for collaborating with large dev teams on your admin panel. (+100 at our largest customer).

https://www.forestadmin.com https://www.gravitee.io/

I didn't have a spare node app sitting around, so I found Forest Admin. This is actually a cool product which provides the simplicity of dashboard tools like ActiveAdmin or Retool, but preserves the privacy of the data by having you self-host the backend. The backend exposes an API that is used by the frontend client, i.e. your browser, so data doesn't need to move through Forest Admin's servers. Here's a nice graphic to visualize how this works:

Disclaimer: I'm the founder of (Forest Admin)[https://www.forestadmin.com].

Wow, I'm impressed by the number of solutions out there. Back at the beginning of Forest Admin, we were alone on the market, which is generally not a good sign. But our perseverance paid off, and it was definitely worth it in the end!

Alright, so why Forest Admin? :)

Because we only focus on the admin panel use case. Not the entire internal tools world. In this way, we are able to provide a fully-featured SaaS Admin panel out of the box. No need to build it, nor with code, nor with low/no code tools.

Even if your app, internal processes and so your admin panel is specific, we have designed our solution accordingly with 2 things that are part of our DNA from the beginning:

1/ We generate all the backend code required to an admin panel. All CRUD routes, filtering & search, dashboarding, permissions, etc. Everything is automatically generated in a few seconds based on datasource introspection. In the end, the generated code is just a standard REST API, so you can extend/override it without any limitations.

2/ We pre-built the admin UI with every admin standard features available out of the box, with a big focus on providing a great UI/UX possible for operational people. We obviously also provide all the low/no code features to customize pretty much anything. We also provide a feature called "Workspace" (which is generally the core of what our competitors do) that allow users build custom views using drag'n'drop of UI components from scratch.

For home-lab/internal UIs, you can go a long way with the auto-generated model-admin pages from Django. If you just need CRUD and actions triggered on a list of models, you can typically avoid any UI work and just define a few Admin classes, and if you need to make custom forms it's quite easy using Django's templating machinery to override individual pages.

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/4.0/ref/contrib/admin/

A similar modular admin system that's more generic is https://www.forestadmin.com/, I think this one has a layout editor too. But that one requires a REST API and so it may require more plumbing, depending on what you've already built. Or it could fit nicely on top of what you already have, if you already have APIs for everything.

In this blog, we'll see how to build a CRUD app with Forest Admin. We'll assume you're building a CRUD app for a PostgreSQL database.

At Forest Admin, we build admin panels for which we need to compute and cache large JSON documents. These documents are stored in redis and retrieved from this storage in order to be as fast as possible.

At Forest Admin, we recently faced this issue to move data from a Postgresql database to ElasticSearch.

Following one of the comments in this thread I reviewed two other products in this space - https://www.staticcms.org/ and https://decapcms.org/ - and it looks like the webpages are almost a direct copy of one another, one in dark mode and one in light mode.

I'm a technical product marketer, and I find these type of landing page copying amusing to no end.

Decap CMS, formerly Netlify CMS, is an extensible headless CMS built as a single-page React app. It’s an open source and completely free-to-use option that offers rich-text editing, real-time preview, and drag-and-drop media uploads.

You can look into a Git-based CMS, such as https://github.com/decaporg/decap-cms

These typically are designed to support static site generators.

I found https://decapcms.org/ which seems like an easy to use.

Did you consider https://decapcms.org/ (previously Netlify CMS)? I'm surprised it never really caught on as it seems a good fit for most small Markdown based sites. Looks like Smashing Magazine was using it before they moved to Tina CMS (https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2020/01/migration-from-word...).

Products like [decap CMS](https://github.com/decaporg/decap-cms) try to bridge that gap, but I agree that this space needs to be further developed. In fact I think there needs to be a bunch more work to allow mere mortals to use version control and branch workflows in day to day work.

I've thought of something similar! A git-based flow for a friend's static portfolio site, where he can make text edits and upload images, and the site builds that content with HTML templates.

Not sure how the GitHub markdown editor would feel for the user. It might be really great, even for uploading images.

I was imagining a static admin page, WYSIWYG, that makes git pushes on submit. These were the headless CMSs that seem to be able to accomplish that:

https://www.siteleaf.com/

https://decapcms.org/

And not git based, but similar idea: https://editable.website/

And this is what the admin edit page usually looks like: https://quick-edit-demo.vercel.app/admin/index.html#/collect...

But was taking a bit of work to configure.

Since I made my post, I've also discovered Decap CMS. This looks fairly close to what I was looking for - it deploys as a static SPA alongside the site on a /admin route, allows login with Github (and several other platforms), and builds the site using a choice of static site generator like Gatsby/Hugo/Jekyll etc. The templates are relatively rigid by default though - page layouts are defined up front, and to add a page with a different layout you need to manually add some files to the repo. It seems like there's a way to work around this and add flexibility, but it needs a bit of custom React development. It seems like this might be worth the time investment for me though, since it's the closest thing I've found to what I need so far.

If you've got the content in .md and .json files and you just need a way to add or modify that content, I would recommend you look into decap CMS (formerly netlify CMS)