What admin panels do you use?
Hey everyone,
I hope you are all doing well. Django admin, Rails admin - these are big players. There is also Laravel's admin I believe and something easy for Express/Sequelize. Is anyone using anything outside these?
Do you know of any admin that does not care about the language/framework of backend? I have been using micro frameworks in Python (Starlette recently) and they usually do not have admins bundled. So I am curious.
Thanks
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I implement my own admin panel. I have a boilerplate for admin functionality that I can customize between projects. My projects are typically written in Go and I use bulma for my CSS framework.
Would you say that admin panel is used by your customers? Does it bring direct value to them?
Go is great, what is your database?
I have two admin panels (dashboards) for users and for actual system admins.
They provide value to users since some of my functions require workflows that don't work so well using a command line tool. Example, we verify ownership of domains before we route traffic to clients requesting it. Also, users may want to view network traffic and statistics which we provide.
For actual admins (me) I can view the state of all of my servers, their stats, change their modes and behaviors. I can also view users, their stats, etc.. and I also have an overview that tells gives me daily stats and operation status.
The database I use right now is MariaDB. I use Redis for caching but will moving my network stats to Redis (soon I hope).
Go is great, the entire stack of Packetriot is written in Go.
This is a really good example for me to understand if my admin product can tackle such workflows which are deeply integrated to third party APIs (DNS check?) and database. You gave me some food for thought. Perhaps I can show you what I am building some time later.
Thanks a lot.
For one of my SaaS product, I have used OroPlatform built on top of Symfony
Thank you for the input, just checked it out. Looks good. Did you build much on it?
2 SaaS solution have been built on it. However now I am feeling it's UI is not based on minimal design concepts.
Now even I am looking out for something else for my next project
Do you mind elaborating the pain point? In fact do you mind if I messaged you about this?
Thanks
Get on to my skype
sachin.g.kulkarni
Forest admin seems pretty good (node/express/sequelize), we use that. Spent years writing custom ones before. This is generated to start, and you can then customize the api it generates if you want, its just a sequelize model. Suprised how well it has held up for the couple of years we have run it. Deploying it and understanding it wasn't entirely straight forward, but works well. https://www.forestadmin.com/
React admin also looks nice if you have an api already, or want to modify it more. Wanted to try that when I start getting more custom requirements. https://marmelab.com/react-admin/
Hey thanks! I had seen Forest a couple days back when I was researching. Looked nice. React admin is very popular these days.
I would dig more into* how essay it is to extend these. I was* planning on building an admin but it could be a pivot for my idea, something practical and concrete.
Language and framework independent, and extend to third party APIs. Still early in my head but I'd love to keep in touch in case I need some input since you seem to have good experience. Would that be okay?
Sure. Yea, I'm not sure about extendability with forest. It was quite flexible around postgres table data, but I don't think it lets you do too much beyond that. I don't really know much about react admin yet.
I recently moved to Netlify CMS after years of coding my own admin panel in Rails.
For me it had a bit of a learning curve but one I got past that, it's been really fantastic. I like that it only takes a few minutes to scaffold up CRUD around a database or integrate with an image upload service (I use Uploadcare).
Hey thanks a lot. I am a bit confused and want to know, would you use Netlify CMS to build an product say like IH itself?
By admin I meant something behind more comprehensive products, not sure if Netlify CMS is how people want to build those kind of products. Am I wrong?
Think I misunderstood the post— was conflating CMS and admin panels :p
No worries at all. But glad to know so many people are happy with Netlify. As I plan for a product, these platforms give me confidence that productivity gains sell well.
Django admin is a really great tool I think.
For express and node I have been looking for an alternative and found https://github.com/SoftwareBrothers/admin-bro. But would love to hear if you know of other tools
You can also pay to get something like: https://www.jetadmin.io
Thank you for the inputs. I have admin-bro on my list to research. This needs dabatabse models written in the ORM it supports. From what I see, it supports mongoose or Sequelize, https://adminbro.com/tutorial-passing-resources.html
So if your models are not in these specific ORMs then it will not work. Also AdminBro plugs into Express or Hapi only it seems.
You are right, AdminBro is for mongoose and Sequelize only.
Are you considering making an admin tool that works for all languages and frameworks?
Yeah I am thinking of database, backend language/framework independent. But that is a solved issue in Python because of SQLAlchemy, one of the oldest ORM and allows you to analyze the database structure and read that in Python.
I want to go a step further which I want to sell - integrate app data with your third party data. Say Stripe, Google Analytics, DigitalOcean. So you could find a sale in your DB and find Stripe API status for that customer without writing any code. Of course some config will be needed, but how much would that change a founder/teams daily work, what do you think?
Cool. So it would provide an overview of each individual customer. Or will also give an overview of the other DB tables you might have?
I think it would be a cool idea, especially if you can make the integrations really convenient.
Here is kinda the rough idea:
So when you see a customer, you not only get all your own data (any tables) but also data that comes from popular third-parties that you added into this admin. Help desk integration could be another. Again you have configure how the system finds out which tickets are from which customer, but API to XYZ Helpdesk is already integrated.
But I intend to have read-only integrations to third party, else too complex.
Ahh I see. I think it would be a helpful tool. Would make it great if you could perform basic CRUD operations on the data from your database
Oh yes for sure, basic CRUD to your own DB, sorry I forgot to mention that.
I think I will create a landing page for this, pre-product and ask who are interested in a closed beta. Just CRUD (own DB) and integrations to top 3 voted third party services.
Like Mailchimp, Stripe, Zendesk... Do you think that is a good approach?
I do think that would be a good approach. As long as you have some users before you start putting to much time into coding it.
My mistake is that I'm always so eager to start coding. That I end up with a product that no one will actually use :D
Oh I'm in that zone, deep in it. Now trying to crawl out of it.
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Also, this admin can easily use your existing backend APIs to do custom stuff like say "Email users who are not activated yet".
Your existing backend (whatever language) probably already does this internally. If you simply make it available on an HTTP API, then this admin can call such stuff when a company staff wants to send such emails.
Hey thank you for the inputs. Understanding the structure of most popular databases is already easy with Python SQLAlchemy. It is one of the most superior DB libraries.
This is a hard problem but the more I think about it the more I start seeing why a lot of teams would love this:
What do you think? I started working on sketchy ideas since yesterday.
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Yeah for sure there is value for the no-code community. But I kinda need to hack out an initial prototype to see what are the possibilities. Thanks for the input.