A new version of Admin Bro - automated admin interface for Node.js apps - is out there.

Last weekend we released a new version of AdminBro. The version number is v0.9 and we think that it is the last release in which we say that the library is in beta stage.

What is Admin Bro?

If you don’t know what the AdminBro is I’ve prepared 2 definitions:

for developers

It is a library which creates an entire Admin Panel where you can reuse your business logic already written in Node.js. It’s based on your schema definition, so building an admin panel from scratch is very easy.

for business:

It is a huge time saver. With AdminBro you can build a complete Admin Panel within hours instead of days.

And this is how it looks:

So what’s new in version v0.9?

I’ve divided changes into 3 parts:

Production optimisations

Since we are graduallP moving out of beta stage we’ve performed multiple optimisations which speed up the application on the production environment:

Added compiling of babel source files when pushing the package to NPM. So now your application is not forced to compile AdminBro on its own in memory. Nevertheless, you can still use original source files when you set ADMIN_BRO_DEV_ENV=true. It could be helpful when you develop extensions to AdminBro

On the production environment (NODE_ENV=production) we compile custom components only once - when the application starts - instead of doing this on every page load.

We use production versions of react and react-dom

The last change is that we don’t minify users components in development, which should ease debugging

UI/UX updates

Thanks to Arron now we can change the theme of the whole Admin Panel (colours, fonts, etc). So you can do something like this:

Take a look at “branding.theme” property under AdminBroOptions

We have improved error handling for the components you write. Before the update, when an error occurred - the entire screen went blank. Now there is a nice message saying what’s happened and the UI stays as it was.

There is a new, improved Login PageNotice messages (the ones you see after saving records etc.) now replace each other and take less space.

Finally, AdminBro has its own logo.

Other improvements

API methods accept perPage parameter so you can fetch more than 10 default records in one API call (max is 500).

Version information is displayed in the upper left corner (this is optional, you can hide it in the settings), so you can see which version of your app has been deployed.

Whenever the page is loading, a loader is displayed.

And finally, more unit tests have been added.

That’s pretty much it - at least for now.

What’s next?

First of all, I would like to encourage you to try out the newest version and give us feedback either by starring the repo or creating an issue (ideally both). On our end, we are still improving the admin panel and preparing a new version - 1.0