# Administration Subsystem

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/administration-subsystem/169690>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [June 7, 2009, 3:58am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/administration-subsystem/169690 "2009-06-07T03:58:39Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Mark\_ASRichman](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/13edae/32.png) [@Mark\_ASRichman](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Mark_ASRichman)\
**Post date:** [June 7, 2009, 3:58am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/administration-subsystem/169690/1 "2009-06-07T03:58:39Z")

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Can someone recommend a gem/plugin for administration of users, roles,  
preferences, etc.? I know various CMS’s like Radiant and BrowserCMS  
have this, but I don’t necessarily want to build all my apps on top of  
them. I’m using Authlogic for authentication and acl9 for  
authorization. I was more curious about user interface options. I’m  
tired of building out my own, and was wondering if there were an easy  
drop-in option. I may actually be better off building on top of a  
framework like Radiant. It just has to be extensible enough to add my  
custom models and workflow. Thoughts?

Thanks,  
Mark

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Mark\_ASRichman](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/13edae/32.png) [@Mark\_ASRichman](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Mark_ASRichman)\
**Post date:** [June 7, 2009, 3:14pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/administration-subsystem/169690/2 "2009-06-07T15:14:58Z")

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As far as something that makes it easy to add new users, roles, etc  
you could look into adding ActiveScaffold to your app.  
[http://wiki.github.com/activescaffold/active\_scaffold](http://wiki.github.com/activescaffold/active_scaffold)

I was designed for acting as admin pages, and the interface is pretty  
nice for things like that. I use it in a project for the main layout  
because I like it. You get some simple search functions for free, the  
author is very active in development (he’s responded quickly when I  
had problems, sometimes caused by my lack of experience with it). And  
it is easy to install (just make sure you also install render  
component plugin if you are using Rails 2.3 or higher (mentioned in  
the readme)).

Carl