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