So I want to play with the active_admin gem. Two basic pieces I need is pages and images. I could setup a system myself, but is there any gems or anything out there that make setting this up easy? Ideally the pages would have ability to have custom slugs, nested pages, custom fields etc. And maybe ability to add images to the pages.
Yes yes maybe I should just go with a system like refinery. But I'm curious if there something lighter out there for what I need.
My suggestion: if you want the "lightweight" way, just go to implement your own CMS.
In my experience, for rails application, rebuilt is much easier and faster than refactoring/reuse, if your requirement is kinda of complex.
Maybe you should have a look at active_cms, which is still in active development, but already useful for basic functionality. You can find it here: https://github.com/geisters/active_cms
Related
I need to get hard decision, and choose between this two CMS gems. It is absolutely incorrect to choose it, based on the frontend design.
After getting into both, I understood, that the difference nowadays is really thin. Help me and show this difference for proper choice.
I need it for little project ~15-20 models
PS: I'm asking not for holy war, I really need to know what to choose
Currently I am using ActiveAdmin,its functionality & customization is easy. But as in your project, if you will use 15-20 model, its header layout will be disturbed. So better to use Rails admin, because its view is much better and you can easily use 15-20 model.
I am wondering if there is a standard pre-built web application for Rails which has all the basic functionalities like user login, user profiles, profile image uploader, comments, search, maybe payments and a set of other usual web application features all bundled and ready to use and extend.
I like how Twitter bootstrap comes with a set of pre-built interface functionalities and styles, which you can start using and modify later. I am looking for something similar that can allow me to quickly set up a working application and go from there.
Does such a framework exist?
There are numerous examples out there.
However, there are two things you should really do:
Read the license to make sure you can use it they way you are thinking of using it.
Ensure you understand the design decisions and choices the original authors made. You will end up in a world of maintenance pain if you just copy cargo-cult style without understanding the tradeoffs others have made with their design decisions.
Any one of the links listed has enough to get you started. They may not have all of the features you listed but together they probably have all of your bases covered. You will have to put in some effort to get all those features working together though.
The RailsApps project is great because they all have tutorials that walk through the basic setup. They are also all built using the Rails Composer tool, which lets you pick and choose certain options for your app.
I've been thinking of writing my own backend, because I feel active_admin might not support all the requirements.
I wanted to ask if Active_Admin supports any of these just to be sure:
I have a has_and_belongs_to_many relationship between my ad model
and tag model. In the new ad page I would like to have the form for
the ads, as well as all available tags so the admin can choose which
tags to associate with the ad. I was able to do that normally in my
application, but can I do that with active_admin?
Can I add custom buttons.. Like one to convert to PDF for example,
or one to send an e-mail..
Could I add some sort of before_filter, so the admin can only view a
model, but not edit or delete it for example?
Thank you.
All of those things can be done via Active Admin, but as it was pointed out, it can be quite a nightmare actually implementing certain things depending on the amount of flexibility you need it to have. For that exact reason, I decided to start rolling my own administration panels.
I have tried an implemented almost all robust gems for admin panels. I have also sweated over several hand-made ones.
Active-Admin is very usability centred, but it is not configuration centred.
As you rightly aniticipated, some of the more complex modifications can be tedious.
In my experience, rails_admin is the best middle ground I could find.
Take a look at it, it is highly functional, completely modular (made as a Rails 3 Engine) and simpler to modify.
If you can live without some details when customizing this is definitely the way to go. However, if you need to have everything just right, then there is not substitute for hand-made.
I have a skin support in my app. I'm looking for a tool, which will enable the customer (not the programmer, which is current) alter the skins.
Is there an admin tool (gem, plugin) for Rails to manage (edit, create, view) these skins? I looking for some easy solution like /admin/skins page where I could do all the stuff, otherwise I'm going to write my own one.
In case there's no such tool - is there any best practice example (possible from other language/framework)? What kind of approach is used in other languages/frameworks?
Any kind of help is appreciated.
Is the theme_support gem a possible solution?
This actually depends on what you want styled. I'm not sure if there are any plugins out there that I haven't heard of yet, but personally I'd just do my own skin styler if I was in your shoes.
My idea is either give your users the ability to customize their page entirely ala myspace in which case you just have to create a semantically robust HTML then make a css uploader that will use their css files for the design.
Or you could limit your users to what you want styled so you can still maintain the basic layout of your site. Just give them access to coloring their fonts, resizing or coloring their backgrounds. No floats or whatsoever. In this case, you have to create something that will take a color/font-size as an input and change that depending on what the user picked.
I have a customer that wants to build their own questionnaires. Something like WuFoo (www.wufoo.com) but more secure and contained within the app.
I've looked at Smerf (http://github.com/springbok/smerf) which provides the yaml-to-form conversion, but I'd like something the user can use to create their own forms.
I would look at using active_scaffold. The main version has not been updated for Rails 3, but a fork at the location below has. I think it would work well for your purpose, you just need a way to grab the data and feed it in. Here is a demo of what it looks like when it is running:
https://github.com/vhochstein/active_scaffold
Here is a demo at the top of the page:
http://demo.activescaffold.com/roles
You could always embed Google Forms. Might be easier than reinventing the wheel. Unless you have some specific use case this doesn't cover?
If you are not adverse to going the Javascript route the then you might consider one of the many framework plugins like the JQuery Form Builder. From a usability perspective it seems to me that any good solution is going to involve some Javascript. There should be no reason why this approach wouldn't integrate well into a Rails backend
You might want to check out this one. Dynamic Forms
I too am looking for something very similar. What solution did you come up with?