Design Free Administration Back Office For Rails Application

There are some common concerns to build a back office for a rails project. Not like the front pages, which are usually designed by professional web designers, back office pages often need to be scratched by programmers. It often takes me a lot of time to do the layout, HTML structures, header and footer, div content boxes, list table styles and form field styles. Though I am familiar with CSS, I still troubled a lot with the overall look and feel because of my lack of the web design gene. So I am writing here to conclude a way to be design fee....

1. Install my plugin uni_admin for admin layout, table styles:

http://code.google.com/p/ruby-on-rails-plugin-uni-admin/

2. Install uni-form and my uni-form-patch for form styles

http://code.google.com/p/rails-uni-form-patch/

3. Install plugin restful authentication for basic authentication

http://xiaoboonrails.blogspot.com/2008/02/install-and-config-rails-plugin.html

4. If you have installed comatose, it is easy to integrate comatose_admin with uni_admin layout

rake comatose:admin:customize
update related content of layouts/uni_admin_layout.html.erb to layouts/comatose_admin.rhtml

Install and config rails plugin restful_authentication

Ruby on rails plugin Restful_authentication is a basic plugin useful for most of rails applications. It is very easy to intall and config it:

script/plugin source http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/plugins
script/plugin install restful_authentication
script/generate authenticated user sessions
rake db:migrate

Check the code in your routes.rb which is automatically added by the generation

map.resources :users
map.resource :session

Add more route mapping if your want

map.signup '/signup', :controller => 'users', :action => 'new'
map.login '/login', :controller => 'sessions', :action => 'new'
map.logout '/logout', :controller => 'sessions', :action => 'destroy'

Visit http://localhost:3000/users/new or http://localhost:3000/signup

Then to make it work with Comatose, add comatose config to evironment.rb of your app:

Comatose.configure do |config|
# Includes AuthenticationSystem in the ComatoseAdminController
config.admin_includes << :authenticated_system

# Calls :login_required as a before_filter
config.admin_authorization = :login_required
end

Some problems of the installation of Rails Comatose Plugin

Comatose is a very handy content management ruby on rails plugin. Here I am listing some problems that I encountered when I get Comatose running correctly. Most of them can be easily fixed by googling. It is just a quick summary just in case you get the same kinds of problems or errors as I did.

To install it:

script/plugin install http://comatose-plugin.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/comatose
script/generate comatose_migration
rake db:migrate
# add to your routes.rb:
map.comatose_admin
map.comatose_root 'pages'
script/server
# visit content admin http://localhost:3000/comatose_admin
# after add a page of name My Page
# visit it at http://localhost:3000/pages/my-page

1. Do rake db migration, get a Mysql::Error: BLOB/TEXT column 'full_path' can't have a default value. To fix it, remove ":default => ''" from the definition of column 'full_path', in the migration file db/migrate/xxx_add_comatose_support.rb

2. To start your rails app, get an error `method_missing': undefined method `comatose_admin' for #. I got this routing error after I use Active Merchant plugin, can not figure out why. Add this to environment.rb to make Comatose plugin be loaded firstly:

config.plugins = [ :comatose, :all ]

3. Install necessary plugins

./script/plugin install acts_as_tree
./script/plugin install acts_as_list

4. To customize comatose admin view

rake comatose:admin:customize

This task will copy all of admin view rthml files to app/view/comatose_admin directory of your rails app. There is a new layout file comatose_admin.rhtml. Modify this layout file to customize your admin view.