Which do you prefer, the old UI or the new V4 UI ?

[GaiheiluKamei]

as described.

[caiotarifa]

I'm really happy with the new interface! But, it would be great if ActiveAdmin could lean towards a 'headless' style. This means focusing more on streamlining the backend and cutting down on CSS and JS to a bare minimum. It would make customizing things a lot simpler and more efficient.

[javierjulio]

To be honest I think of it that way already. It’s meant to be a base style that you can easily modify. More so than before. Selectors are written with low specificity which helps greatly.

[GaiheiluKamei]

Maybe it's because the old style has been around for a long time and I'm not used to the new changes. The major adjustment for me was primarily caused by significant alterations in fonts, layouts, and other elements, resulting in a notably reduced information density per page.

However, I truly value the diligent efforts of the maintainers, I just need some time to adapt, and I'm also curious to know if others are feeling the same way.

[javierjulio]

@GaiheiluKamei thank you. I really appreciate that clarification as it comes across otherwise. A significant amount of time and effort has gone into this release, without support, in an effort to give the library a new lease of life for many more years.

The theme is just a default for light and dark modes. It's intentional to be clean and simple. Not only can you, you are meant to customize it. No one is forcing this default theme and/or layout on you. The extraction to partials was done so you could modify the styles and layout easily and ideally without monkey patches. For example, I've seen gems for changing the sidebar position. It's now in the layout file in 2 lines wrapped by a simple CSS grid. No need to monkey patch anything. You have the ability to make design preference changes yourself through simpler CSS overrides than before. That's very much by design here.

[javierjulio]

@caiotarifa that's an interesting point of view. In my experience, others prefer something ready out of the box. Using another gem to provide styles though has its own issues. I wouldn't be for that primarily because of the issues around Rails engines that provide frontend code and assets. There isn't much support around that. Others have high expectations now e.g. no-node/no-build or all node. There isn't anymore plug-in-play type of integration either. Hence the approach we are taking with v4.

[GaiheiluKamei]

I have been exploring various CMS platforms in different languages for some time, and I have developed a newfound appreciation for ActiveAdmin. I found that even though Strapi is quite good, it lacks the simplicity, elegance, and customizability that ActiveAdmin offers. Thank you so much for all that you've done for the Rails community!