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by patio11 5413 days ago
You really ought to take a look at them. I know it's hard to take things from Themeforest too seriously. It was hard for me too. Now I feel dumb about that.

To elaborate on what Thomas is saying: they revolutionized rapid application development at both our companies, for like $15 each.

In consulting projects I often have call to create little one-off internal tools in Rails, either as a prototype for a tool the client will create or to support their marketing team. These generally have development budgets measured in days, and I have the HTML/CSS skills of roadkilled turtles, so they came out totally unstyled. I'm now embarrassed by them: now when I start a Rails project I drop in one of my prepared admin theme layouts and blammo it magically looks professional.

Given that my clients end up paying thousands for those mini-projects, the level of polish is clearly worth it. It's like a Tiffany box versus delivering the ring in a small paper bag: if you think it doesn't matter, your mental model of human cognition is broken.
2 comments
div 5413 days ago
Did you just buy and convert a few admin themes that you now have shelved for future projects or is there some sort of workflow / tool you use to integrate these themes into your rails app ?

I just found out about install_theme (https://github.com/drnic/install_theme) which looks usefull.

Personally I've been using active_admin for simple apps, which has a pretty good theme, but there's not really much variation, if any.

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patio11 5413 days ago
I considered doing something more elaborate, but honestly, "Buy, download, SASS, HAML" only takes a morning.
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ssp 5413 days ago
In consulting projects I often have call to create little one-off internal tools in Rails, either as a prototype for a tool the client will create or to support their marketing team. These generally have development budgets measured in days, and I have the HTML/CSS skills of roadkilled turtles,

It sounds to me like substantial chunks of these projects could be automated, and that there might be a market for an internal-rails-tool-in-a-can type product.

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