There’s never been a better time for maintainers and community members across the Ruby community to come together and collaborate. Let’s talk, learn, and strengthen our commitment to building stuff that matters. While we’re at it, let’s ship some updates!
At this year’s thoughtbot Open Summit on October 31st, we’ll be shining a spotlight on both new ideas and mature tools from across the Ruby on Rails ecosystem. One such tool is Administrate, the Rails-native admin framework that you might not realize you’ve been missing out on.
Reintroducing Administrate
Administrate is an admin dashboard framework that’s designed to feel like a natural extension of your Rails codebase. There are no domain-specific languages to learn or rigid workflows to fight against, just controllers and views that you can override whenever you need to. Like Rails, this simplicity makes it both fast to start with and flexible enough to grow alongside your product.
Administrate is a thoughtbot open source project maintained by Nick Charlton, a Senior Developer on our team who just celebrated his 10th (wow!) anniversary with us. In Nick’s words, “Administrate is simple so that you can get complex with it. It doesn’t do too much magic, it’s just Rails. You can override bits because it’s just a controller.”
Other admin frameworks often introduce their own DSLs or force a specific way of working, which can become painful later.
I saw people struggling to build custom views with other frameworks because they didn’t work the way Rails does. With Administrate, you don’t hit that wall. You just use Rails.
Nick has been maintaining Administrate for nearly a decade. When the original maintainer left thoughtbot early on in the project’s development, he stepped in to keep it alive. “People were being grumpy about the state of the project in issues,” he recalls. “I jumped in and tried to fix a bunch of things because I wanted it to continue to exist.”
Over the years, Nick has led the project through wave after wave of Rails updates, asset pipeline changes, JavaScript and CSS handling, and namespace support. As Nick says, “If I thought it was the wrong way to approach the problem, I would’ve stopped a long time ago. But I still believe this is the right solution.”
Although Administrate has been quietly powering client apps at thoughtbot and beyond, it has never officially reached v 1.0, which makes this year’s session thoughtbot Open Summit a milestone moment as Nick cuts the long-awaited 1.0 release live on stream!
This marks a turning point for the project, a reintroduction to the Rails community, and an invitation for developers to adopt it and contribute.
What to expect at the Administrate session
The Administrate session, like the rest of thoughtbot Open Summit, isn’t going to be a background talk you half-listen to while checking Slack. It will happen live and is designed to be interactive and collaborative.
First, you’ll see maintainers Nick Charlton and Pablo Brasero cut the 1.0 release live on stream, a moment nearly a decade in the making.
From there, Nick will walk through what makes Administrate unique: its “boring Rails” philosophy, how it differs from other admin frameworks, and how that simplicity makes it both easy to get started and powerful for complex apps.
You can expect real-world examples from projects and a look at features like namespace support, which have been long-requested by the community.
Nick will be inviting attendees to ask questions, share feedback, and even contribute during the session.
Even small contributions matter. It’s just Rails, it’s well tested, so anyone can dive in.”
Whether you’re curious about trying Administrate, already using it in production, or interested in finding a new project to contribute to, the session will provide both the context and the opportunity to get involved.