What is Flask-Admin?

Nice. Definitely something that I miss when using Express for a UI-centric project. Seemed like only the "kitchen sink" frameworks (Rails, Django) had decent CRUD/admin UI options.

Maybe lead with that it is a CRUD package for the Python framework Flask rather than expecting readers to be familiar with the Python ecosystem enough to be aware of what it is?

From the documentation at http://flask-admin.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

Flask-Admin is a batteries-included, simple-to-use Flask extension that lets you add admin interfaces to Flask applications. It is inspired by the django-admin package, but implemented in such a way that the developer has total control of the look, feel and functionality of the resulting application.

Getting the admin-interface correct is one of those holy grails. The problem I typically run into is adding complex wizards or features outside of the standard crud stack.

When I'm investigating an out of the box admin interface I'm _less concerned_ about how they handle CRUD; that's the easy part. Really I need to know how they handle things that go well beyond their stack.

For example, in one application we need to create events for people (like google calendar). You need to be able to search for people, show the system what they already have assigned at that time and allow you to choose times that are best for everyone in the list. This has been designed as a multi-step wizard and it works great but it was a ton of custom code. Looking at the online documentation of flask I'm not sure how I would go about integrating something like this.

The great thing about the Django Admin is that - because it was actually part of the Django itself - there is a whole ecosystem of extensions, add-ons, skins etc for it.

Any attempts to replace it for Django would have an uphill struggle for that reason alone.

This is one side-effect of an opinionated framework - the provision of a default choice facilitates cooperation and prevents fragmentation.

(We recently picked up a Pyramid project and I was rather surprised how big the impact was of the extra choice. Simply in terms of searching for answers to questions - we often had to find an answer from someone who was using the same combination of parts that we were using. And figuring out how to do x often fell into the gaps in the docs between two components and was therefore harder to figure out)