Mandarin + Forage - An admin tool for phoenix

I see a problem here, as there is already one Elixir project named Bureaucrat.

I could swear I had looked that up on hex.pm… Well, I have to pick some other name then.

EDIT: I accept suggestions

EDIT2: maybe I should squat on forage too, before someone claims it

Will it be like RailsAdmin? If so what about PhoenixAdmin?

I have never used Rails (much less RailsAdmin), so I don’t know how it compares.

Additionally, PhoenixAdmin sounds like something very “official”, like if it were the thing everyone shoul be using. I don’t think I want that kind of responsibility

But thank you for you suggestion. I’ll think about it.

Understandable

I’d definitely look at RailsAdmin for inspiration tho - although I haven’t used it myself for a while I remember how easy to set up it was, you could get away with almost zero configuration from what I remember, very plug and play

There is a tradeoff between “being very plug and play” (AKA magic) and “being easily customizable”. If you look at the readme of the sample project above, you’ll see that it requires a couple of easy changes to your router and to your repo, but most of the work is done by phoenix-style generators.

Such generators will generate context, schemas, views, controllers and templates for your modules. This results in A LOT of extra lines of code for your project. I could cut back on it by encapsulating most of that in a macro, such as: gen_admin(MySchema), and that wouldn’t pollute your application’s source with the extra files. But then customizing that would be hell. Dumping literal files into your source is still the easiest way of allowing for customization.

I could save on lines of code by dumping files containing modules with lot’s of overrideable function calls. That’s what most python packages do: they have some classes that implement the full behaviour you want and make you override methods in order to customize the functionality you want. But having the source of the original “method” (in elixir’s case, function) in front of you helps with customizability.

I’ve taken a look at a demo app generated with Rails admin (here: http://rails-admin-tb.herokuapp.com/admin/). I support pretty much the same functionality, although not in such an elegant way. RailsAdmin probably does most of the work inside its classes, while I just dump code into your project. I think I support some things RailsAdmin doesn’t, like more specific filters, but that might just be the app I’ve seen.

The theme in my dashboard was copied from AdminLTE, which I got to know because of ExAdmin, by @smpallen99, without which this package wouldn’t exist, even though we share no actual code . I’ve also taken inspiration from torch, which also uses generators and from which I’ve copied the frontend part of the filters (again, without copying any actual code).

My project is actually very similar to torch. I think the main difference is that I support association filters, while torch doesn’t, because my query builder (forage) might be a little more powerful than theirs (filtrex). I also like my templates better, even though they could use some improvement.

I should have acknowledged all these sources of inspiration in the Readme, but I didn’t have the time. I’ll be sure to include all sources of inspiration, as well as competing libraries and why I haven’t used them.

Also, something I’ve forgotten to mentions. Because this project uses normal Phoenix abstractions, it’s trivially easy to have muitiple admin interfaces. The admin interfaces are namepaced according to the context they refer to, and you could have multiple ones, such as Admin, Staff, Moderator, User, etc, each protected by different permissions and all of that.

I’d use something like bureacratic or frontdesk.

Well, this is open source. Assuming a car doesn’t kill you on the spot one morning, you can always hand ownership over to somebody else. I see nothing wrong with a bit more official-looking name.

Go for an “adjacent” name then, for example:

The Bennu is an ancient Egyptian deity linked with the sun, creation, and rebirth. It may have been the inspiration for the phoenix in Greek mythology.

… just as an example.

Very interested in this. Using ex_admin now, but the projects dead.

Do you have screenshots for the admin interface?

I think it would be better not to generate code, but use macros that generate the code. It’s way more maintainable, otherwise you’re stuck with a lot of scaffolds in your app, and it’s way harder to upgrade when there is more functionality. Just provide the minimal information to be able to build the admin interface. I think ExAdmin in that sense is pretty neat (execution is not great though).