Kudos to the developer for having a nicely presented web site for the project too, and not just a github repo. All too often, a lot of awesome projects hide on github without some upfront presentation of the work beyond a short README file.
The developer will know why their work is great and how it can help others, but you have to make it easy to recognize for the uninitiated too. That still applies for technical projects that are going to require advanced programming efforts to integrate anyway. Don't think of it as marketing, think of it as a necessary step to evangelizing your work and bringing its benefits to a wider audience.
I honestly expected to pay for this until I hit 'Get the code' and saw a github page. Simply making the website aesthetically pleasing increased my willingness to download and pay by an order of magnitude.
True. For cynical people and coders used to a corporate environment, 'markting' is often something which overhypes a product, or makes promises in a sales situation that they then have to put up with and develop.
Whatever it's called, marketing isn't just something for companies, large or small. It can apply to single developers, who simply want to make sure all the hard work put into a project ends being worth it, because other developers benefited from your code.
That's a great question and something I plan on writing a full blog post about. But, from a high level, here are the projet goals we've been working with:
1. An administration interface must be good looking and easy to use. The interface is not for developers who understand the underlying data model, rather for operations staff who need to do their job and service our customers.
2. Administration of a production application is way more complex than a simple CRUD of database tables. Although editing data is necessary, most of the time operations staff are finding a resource and performing an action on it or looking up historical data.
3. An administration framework must be highly customizable. Active Admin makes it easy to add controller actions, sidebar elements, action buttons, dashboard widgets, custom forms, show screens and hook in to all resources via plugins.
Right now it looks* like rails_admin is a bit more feature complete as far as CRUD administration goes (+ history of edits). While ActiveRails has feature like comments which may be more relevant to less technical users.
* Disclaimer: I'm more familiar (and probably biased) with rails_admin
There was a lot of care in delivering this product. As others have pointed out, this is so compellingly done that you could legitimately expect to pay for it. But no, it's open sourced - thank you very much for that.
I definitely now have plans to incorporate this as an experiment in the next application I cook up. Excited to have an option available which can reduce admin development time dramatically, freeing me up to worry almost entirely on UX and front functionality.
This reminds me of a recent research I've done on admin user interfaces in general. This one looks pretty spiffy, but there are good alternatives if you don't necessarily need the full framework. Here are some leads I've found:
They all seem too "thick". I guess they might work if I was starting from scratch but they look like a pain to migrate to. Has anyone come up with something much leaner?
Active Admin does look very pretty, but in defense of ActiveScaffold, it is simple, works, and is easy to set up. Being able to throw up Active Scaffold generated pages has saved me a ton of time over the last couple years.
For future reference, you're being downvoted because Hacker News has traditionally looked down upon non-contributive, vacuous one-word comments. Particularly if they looked like they're coming from new accounts to try to boost the article's ranking.
Since you appear to be one of the developers on this project, I think it would have been better received if you had introduced yourself as such.
As I've painfully discovered myself, being humorous, especially sarcastic or filled with dry humor often attracts downvotes too, no matter how funny you thought the joke was.
I fully understand and agree with the rationale, hartror. It's just a little difficult to reign myself in and exercise the kind of self control needed here. But the inevitable and swift downvotes I've gotten certain helped to drive the point home.
I need some kind of Chrome extension that injects a confirmation dialog box that asks 'Are you trying to be funny?' before I post to HN.
The idea is that there are plenty of other places[1][2] to be humourous on the interwebs. By coming down hard on the few instances that are posted it stops entire threads turning into just these amusing but ultimately unproductive comments.
edw519 regularly says something laugh-out-loud funny that also helps the conversation along, and scores a bunch of points. Other people often say things that are only slightly funny and have no other value to them, and score a bunch of negative points.
Funny and contributing = upvoted
Not funny and contributing = upvoted
Funny and not contributing = downvoted
Not funny and not contributing = downvoted
Don't make the mistake of thinking funny/not funny is the deciding factor.
The developer will know why their work is great and how it can help others, but you have to make it easy to recognize for the uninitiated too. That still applies for technical projects that are going to require advanced programming efforts to integrate anyway. Don't think of it as marketing, think of it as a necessary step to evangelizing your work and bringing its benefits to a wider audience.