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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

No, Blueprint (which I am a fan of, especially with Compass/Sass --- we shipped a product built on Blueprint) is a CSS grid that happens to have some nice typographic defaults.

Admin themes --- which, again, cost tens of dollars --- are uncannily similar to Twitter Bootstrap: they include full page layouts with dummy navs and a series of demo pages with styled markup for... well, more than is in Twitter Bootstrap! (They get to cheat and use jQuery). They are basically what you'd get if you gave a designer the brief "build the layout for my app, Lorem Ipsum 3.2 Pro".

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.

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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.

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.

I considered doing something more elaborate, but honestly, "Buy, download, SASS, HAML" only takes a morning.

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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