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I’ve just released the first version of admin_assistant, which is a gem meant to make it very fast to build admin interfaces in Rails. You can install it is a gem, though you’ll have to add Github as a gem source because of one of the dependencies. You can also install it from Github if you’re so inclined.

Here’s the README:

admin_assistant is a Rails plugin that automates a lot of features typically needed in admin interfaces. Current features include:

• Your basic CReate / Update / Delete
• Index with pagination and field ordering
• Search, either by all text fields or by specific fields
• Live querying of models to generate forms and indexes, meaning that adding new columns to your admin controllers is easy
• Simple handling of belongs_to association via drop-down selects
• Built-in support for Paperclip and FileColumn

I’m following a few design principles in building this:

• admin_assistant’s specs are written through an actual Rails app: I believe this is the only sensible way to test a Rails plugin that deals with lots of controller actions and views.
• admin_assistant will support multiple versions of Rails, so I’m experimenting with a spec suite that can be run against all versions with one Rake task.
• admin_assistant will be severely hookable. If you’re copying and pasting something out of vendor/plugins/admin_assistant, that’s a design flaw.
• admin_assistant will be minimally invasive to the rest of the Rails app. It does not require that you add strange one-off methods to an important model just to do something in an admin controller. And I’ll try to avoid doing anything silly like alias_method_chaining anything on ActionController::Base.
• admin_assistant will have some safe defaults, including turning off the destroy action by default, and not filling in dates and times with the current date or time (which is almost always useless).

There are also some features I’m skimping on right now:

• Super-pretty CSS: Because I suck at CSS. Submissions of themes are welcome though.
• Super-fancy Ajax: Because I think it’s easy to do this wrong. But there will be some Ajax at some point I spose.

Basically, this plugin should act like a really great administrative assistant in your office. It tries to be extremely helpful, but it won’t get underfoot or tell you how to do your job.