I love the new UI, but imposing tailwind as a dependency for Rails projects is kinda bad.

Imagine I have a project that serves some User facing content and uses AA as the backoffice. I'm using Tailwind 3 for all styling.

Now, if I want to move from Tw3 to 4 I need for AA to release a version with that change, so in my TW v4 upgrade I need also to upgrade AA. If I have customizations in the AA views or my own views, that upgrade alone is big enough.

This makes the scope of the work bigger, riskier and harder to tackle.

I know that making decisions that make AA center of a project and indirectly dictate your upgrade pace is bad, but here we are 😅

but imposing tailwind as a dependency for Rails projects is kinda bad.

Fortunately, Tailwind is not a requirement for ActiveAdmin. In fact, ActiveAdmin does not depend on cssbundling, tailwindcss-rails, or tailwindcss-ruby.

As a side note, I’d like to mention that kaminari is imposed. kaminari extends all ActiveRecord classes at the application level with pagination functionality, which is applied even outside of ActiveAdmin. This approach can cause conflicts if you prefer to use other pagination libraries, such as pagy.

Returning to the topic of Tailwind, thanks to @jaynetics, you can use activeadmin_assets to serve ActiveAdmin assets without needing Tailwind.

Thanks for the response @tagliala. From the upgrade guide for beta 15, I understood I needed to have tailwind in my gemfile to make AA4 work. Re-reading, it seems not, but still need to deal a bit with tailwind to build the css. My bad.

Question: even with Tailwind not being a hard requirement, if I am on version N of Tailwind, which is the same as ActiveAdmin at some point, and I want to go to tailwind N+1, will it be OK or will I need to wait for AA to catch up?

Thanks.

will it be OK or will I need to wait for AA to catch up?

I think it could be an issue if the new Tailwind version is not backward compatible, especially because of the dependency on flowbite. While it might not be a blocking problem, it could still cause difficulties in upgrading.

If you do not need to customize Active Admin, such as using different Tailwind classes in partials or creating new components, it may be a good idea to consider https://github.com/jaynetics/activeadmin_assets for serving pre-compiled assets.

Also, we're a bit off topic here since this is a poll about the UI. For a more relevant discussion, you might want to look at #8223.

Thank you!