Backend administration in Ruby on Rails

I think namespaces is the solution to the problem you have here:

map.namespace :admin do |admin|    admin.resources :customersend

Which will create routes admin_customers, new_admin_customers, etc.

Then inside the app/controller directory you can have an admin directory. Inside your admin directory, create an admin controller:

./script/generate rspec_controller admin/adminclass Admin::AdminController < ApplicationController  layout "admin"  before_filter :login_requiredend

Then create an admin customers controller:

./script/generate rspec_controller admin/customers

And make this inhert from your ApplicationController:

class Admin::CustomersController < Admin::AdminController

This will look for views in app/views/admin/customersand will expect a layout in app/views/layouts/admin.html.erb.

You can then use whichever plugin or code you like to actually do your administration, streamline, ActiveScaffold, whatever personally I like to use resourcecs_controller, as it saves you a lot of time if you use a REST style architecture, and forcing yourself down that route can save a lot of time elsewhere. Though if you inherited the application that's a moot point by now.

Do check out active_admin at https://github.com/gregbell/active_admin.

I have used Streamlined pretty extensively.

To get Streamline working you create your own controllers - so you can actually run it completely apart from the rest of your application, and you can even run it in a separate 'admin' folder and namespace that can be secured with .

Here is the Customers controller from a recent app:

class CustomersController < ApplicationController  layout 'streamlined'  acts_as_streamlined         Streamlined.ui_for(Customer) do    exporters :csv       new_submit_button :ajax => false     default_order_options :order => "created_at desc"       list_columns :name, :email, :mobile, :comments, :action_required_yes_no    endend