I’ve been enjoying Administrate , found through Chris Oliver’s Jumpstart Rails.
I enjoy Administrate precisely because its first guideline is “No DSLs (domain-specific languages)”. I previously used RailsAdmin in my app and indeed did end up quitting because of its DSL and limited maintenance. I managed to stick with Administrate and was able to submit contributions when I encountered some limitations. Two developers from Thoughtbot seem to be regularly maintaining the library, usually every week, and they are steadily preparing for a 1.0 release (I personally run our prod app using the master branch, as their release speed is a bit too slow for my liking).
FYI I wrote the same feedback in this other thread.
Personally I don’t think that looking at download numbers, stars etc is necessarily relevant, as Rails has a long history and projects may not stay updated with the needed bug fixes and enhancements. For instance that approach had led me to choose Globalize for my translations, which right now still declares itself as the “de-facto standard library for ActiveRecord model/data translation” but I encountered various issues with it and the maintainers themselves admitted they instead use Mobility for new apps.
