There haven't really been any admin panels in the javascript world to my knowledge that are far beyond the "weekend project" phase. (Please note that I phrased that strongly, because I would love to find out I was simply overlooking a capable contender).
For a wide swath of jobs where one might be tasked with providing minimum necessary cms/admin functionality, the Rails ecosystem excels, with ActiveAdmin[1] and more recently RailsAdmin[2] both strong contenders. Both offer out-of-the-box integration with authentication/authorization frameworks like Devise and CanCan, image/file upload, etc.
I want that in Javascript.
Not because I think that admin panels are such a great thing, but just because especially doing lots of contracting and agency work -- you're going to need them sometimes. You just are.
If you were making a product, maybe you'd turn your nose up at an admin panel (suspect security, not performant), but they're a force multiplier when you have very limited 'I need to be able to manage data X' requirements for a project, and don't want to limit your future options or get bogged down building interfaces only two humans will ever see.
I very specifically want great Javascript admin panels to proliferate, because I want to be able to do some of those quick projects in node.js, and admin panels are such a selling point of Rails at most agencies. :)
---- [1] http://www.activeadmin.info/ [2] https://github.com/sferik/rails_admin
Authentication and authorization is yet to be standardized. This is the big part of an admin backend. Also, because there's no standard ORM, data store, or even schema, it's really hard to get something completely agnostic. You'd have to present a boat load of configurations for it to work, but then you wouldn't achieve "working right out-of-the-box."
And in addition to not having an ActiveRecord-style de facto standard interface for CRUD, and having a much wilder profusion of datastores than the SQL/almost-first-class-citizen-Mongo in much of RailsLand, the node.js community is pulled in a lot of different directions because of Real-Time.
What's the future of ORMs in a real-time world? Projects like Derby/Racer are a fascinating/messy glimpse into what kinds of forces are shaping the data layer.
Look at how much harder simple things like validation/authorization are when you're dealing with an OT engine that doesn't understand schemas, and which do its job necessarily lives half in Redis and half in Mongo, using the ShareDB api ...
Node.js has a lot of wonderful excuses not to have an admin panel; most of them are related to why node is awesome.
That being said, I hope we get some admin panels. :) Passport.js is a decent Devise standin, for instance, and there are a lot more ORM/ODM options now than there were two years ago.
Rich Hickey recently gave one of his talks[1] where at one point he offhandedly mentioned that hypermedia (which gives URIs for related HTTP resources, with some link-like metadata) doesn't make sense for APIs because APIs don't have human "drivers" that can read the link text and make meaningful sense of what relations actually mean in the domain model.
I think the genius of RESTful hypermedia, though, could really come through in a system like this. How else do you show relations? Last time I checked, RailsAdmin can't do much for you here except provide the resource ID as a link to that resource's table and row.
As a benign example, imagine a guest-party admin page. What today would look like "Guest: 'Pitt, Brad', Party: '43'", tomorrow could be be "Guest: 'Pitt, Brad', Party: 'Pitt-Jolie'" with a link to '/parties/43'.
I sense that developers (or at least Crockford[2]?) don't want JSON to become overloaded with XML equivalents like XML schemas and metaschemas and XSLT...but think of what we could do!
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROor6_NGIWU
[2] http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Heretical-Open-Source ?
Can you please at least describe the features before you get into installation?
