Update on trestle/rails

The creator of trestle is a very helpful and prompt person. That’s great news as trestle approaches 1.0.

Trestle, a flexible, modern admin framework for Ruby on Rails, is https://trestle.io/. Feel free to explore more about Trestle and its features on their website.

I also found some nice free icons at https://iconify.design. SVG format, no downloading, or installing, or gems required. Just copy the SVG code into your partial. You can customise also before copying the code.

Trestle (Admin) for Rails — no documentation

(June 2023) I’ve been trying out various admin gems / frameworks for ruby on rails. These include avo, madmin, bullet-train and recently trestle.

Trestle is very good, it creates very clean, attractive screens with tabs and sidebars. It uses bootstrap unlike most of the others which use tailwind. You can use it with postgres or sqlite but I think postgres would be better since the search and other add-on gems use postgres, especially search.

However, there is surprisingly one big stumbling block to Trestle. It has no documentation. Or the demo application is the documentation. You have to sift through the demo, or grep/ag/rg through the gem’s source to figure things out.

That’s not exactly something that is going to help people on-board it. However, I’d hate to leave this without sticking around for a little longer. I don’t know how much customization is possible. I guess I’ll get back on this in a week by which time I hope to decide whether to continue.

That way, in comparison Avo has very good documentation and their developer Adrian Marin helps out very quickly.

Let’s say I have a table/index view in Avo for posts. Each post contains an author (which links to the author table). Avo uses the ransack gem. I can easily sort the table/index view on the author. In trestle, this is a tad more complicated, and should not be since this is a standard requirement. Or let’s say my index view of authors shows the count of books. I should be able to sort on the count of books. This is easy in Avo, but I’ve not been able to figure out how to do this in trestle.

That said I am still loving the way I can organize the form, make tabs, sections, sidebars with trestle.

That said trestle is at 0.9.8, so hopefully by version 1, we’ll have some good documentation.

I’ll update this in a week after some more work.

EDIT: The creator of trestle has been extremely helpful and answers queries immediately. I’ve been able to sort out a couple issues like the above instantly. Look forward to working more with it in the next week.