We are all craving a new Rails admin dashboard solution

When it comes to admin interfaces, the most popular choice is Active Admin… Unfortunately, many of us are becoming fatigued by AA. Customizations using Arbe can grow pretty painful, especially if you don’t have extensive knowledge of the documentation. Any sort of non-standard data relationship requires a bunch of custom coding, and this ends up wiping a considerable amount of the benefit of using the framework in the first place.

Rails Admin, the second most popular choice, can be equally difficult to customize, and many find the Twitter Bootstrap design ugly.

Don’t get me wrong… Active Admin and Rails Admin are far from unusable. But they can be frustrating to work with when you need to stray just a bit outside the box.

So when thoughtbot announced Administrate just over a year ago, the community was understandably excited to finally have an alternative worth looking in to.

Isn’t Administrate a dead project?

In mid-2016 it looked like Administrate was abandonware. There hadn’t been a release in several months, and there were piles of open issues and pull requests. Someone even opened up a GitHub issue asking what the story was.

All of this would make you justifiably scared to use it in your next app. No one wants to use a project that isn’t being actively maintained, especially when your clients will end up depending on it.

Don’t worry, Administrate is alive and well!

After launching my own investigation, I am happy to report that Administrate is not dead.

The original maintainer left thoughbot, and a pause in development was required while searching for a new person to carry the torch. But since the start of 2017…

Administrate Project Status Tweet

Not only does it look like there is a new maintainer, but there is also a new release coming to address Rails 5 dependency issues.

I plan to keep close tabs on this project and use it heavily. If you’d like to follow along, please subscribe below.