Do you create admin panels/dashboards for your products?
Hey IHs,
I usually delay creating Admin panels and dashboards for my projects until it becomes really needed to have one .. how about you and do you use open source dashboards for your projects or create your own?
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FWIW, we're just about to create an admin dashboard, and we're about 7 months in to having the product live. This is at my request (as one of the non-technical founders) because we're starting to have customer service needs and I need to have visibility into what's happening in the database. The current plan is to use Retool.
Same here for most of my work, I only need them when I engage with non technical people or when things are scaling and I need a quick way to make changes or export data .. otherwise I'm also use Sql directly most of the time :)
It depends.
At Localazy, we have several admin systems for different users. Back then, when we only had a few customers, creating an internal admin wasn't worth it.
However, as the service grows, we not only need to do more tasks because of support requests, etc., but we also need our non-tech colleagues to be able to do them. Therefore, it's necessary to have something better than the database admin tool :-).
Same situation, this is why is started active looking :)
We use SQL-based dashboards for read-only work. Playing around with retool.com, but so far there was no real need to have a dashboard with write functionality.
Django gives you this for free. You can customize them if needed, but for what I need, they give me 80% without any effort.
Yes, have used it once long time ago, probably I need to give it a shot again ..
Yeah, Django makes admin pannels unbelievably easy.
I customize my columns and add a search bar for certain tables, but that's it.
It's super-dope.
Similar here but symfony. First time I tried django a solid 10 years ago I remember that being a game-changer!
For Rails developers, depending on the time/money you can dedicate to the development of your dashboard:
If you're into Laravel, I would highly recommend Backpack for Laravel. It's open source and free. It does have a paid Pro-addon as well, but even without Pro it's a very complete dashboard framework. I have used it for more than 10 client projects the last two years. I've also tried Nova and Voyager, they're great to. But Backpack is less opinionated and it's very easy to add it into an existing dashboard.
Cool, heard a lot about Laravel but never used it to build anything myself .. for using Backpack do I need to know Laravel?
Laravel is the most popular PHP framework. if Laravel interests you, I would suggest learning Laravel before learning Backpack. If you want something up and running faster (and still want to learn Laravel along the way), then I would rather recommend Laravel Voyager - https://voyager.devdojo.com/. As long as you manage to complete the actual installation - You can rely on doing most of the admin stuff from within the UI/dashboard, not having to touch code that much. Voyager (by DevDojo) has a lot of great video learning material as well. Both for Laravel in general, and how to setup Voyager.
Also, check for Filament. It is based on the TALL stack and builds the complete admin features in just a day.
Just wanted to thank you once again for this great tip, after studying Filament a bit more. Discovering an amazing open source project feels like opening a birthday present :)
I felt the same way when I discovered Filament from Github😃😃. I spent the whole day building the admin panel for getlaunchlist.com. It was worth it, I am now using Filament for all my projects 😊
Thanks a lot - I had not heard of it before. It looks beautiful and less cluttered. I will for sure try it out!
We're moving from 8base to directus for our back-end needs which comes bundled with administration features and no-code dashboards. Well worth checking it out - https://directus.io/
Thank you, I was planning to give directus a shot too, it has a pretty solid feature set out of the box
I do because the development process is very quick.
https://filamentphp.com/
I think Filament Admin is the most progressive admin panel page I've ever seen.
(Laravel)
I always create my own. I think I tried an admin gem (for ruby on rails) a couple of times and I didn’t like it. It would take me longer to figure out how to use it VS enrolling my own.
I write small command line tools using Go and have it fetch the data I need. It's much quicker to iterate without the burden of a GUI. Later when the product is stable I can come back to the dashboard.
I built one pretty early to make sure I could keep track of stats and do simple tasks through it. Ended up using Retool, but will likely switch in a few weeks to something that is faster.
You can use https://www.loopple.com/ to create dashboards. It will help you prototype your admin panels faster, and in the end you can download the source code.
In my SaaS boilerplate (getparthenon.com) there is an admin system built in as well as a dashboard page in the admin system.
What I've found is, once you grow to a certain level they're really important. And you only really need custom functionality in your admin system once your system is really large and complex. So what I would suggest is you find an admin library for your language of choice and use that. Personally, I think a good admin library/package should basically just be configuring it the majority of the good.
We didn't have one for https://www.nocodepayments.dev/ but there were some suggestions for immediate need so I open sources one and built in two days, currently its very minimalistic.
Why still you don't create admin panel and dashboard for your project even i create for my project (https://techoffersbd.com/) and also working.
I have a single dashboard app for all of my smaller projects. I'll build the backend in each project's backend, but I have a single webapp for all my dashboards. This is mainly so I can look at everything at a glance on a single dashboard. This is just for reporting.
Once I get to needing a more complex management, I'll probably build that out as a separate app.
That's very interesting approach, specially if you follow the same patterns in all of your projects (I mostly do)
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