Hello!
One topic that seemed very simple in the beginning but ended up by being kind of complex (as more complex and bigger project came towards me) is the admin aspect of a web application/site.
I couldn't find many articles/resources on "admin best practices" and **website/application administration patterns**. I know that the solution is very dependant from the problem being solved (project) but I would really like to know more about this subject that ended up by not being so trivial.
For my last Rails project, I created a static role based system where I defined in the controllers using before filters which kind of user (based on a user_level attribute) could access each action. So, admins could access "POST" actions and everyone else could access "GET" actions.
Take Django for example - you build the application and get a production-ready admin interface for free. This feature is extremelly attractive, since I find that the most boring and time-consuming aspect of the application is indeed the CRUD admin interface for the content-creators or website administrators or whatever they may be called.
Also, I find that separating "front-end" controllers from "admin" controller (putting the admin controller into an admin namespace) to be a good organisational technique to focus each of them on its responsabilities (GETting content versus POSTing content) but many folks @ #rubyonrails told me that this isn't really the way to go.
So, how would you implement an administration interface/control panel on a large application built in Rails? And if this application uses RESTful model, how should you handle it?
So, please, if you could enlighten-me on this subject, I would be grateful.
Thanks,
Marcelo.