I'm actually considering designing a Bootstrap admin template myself. Do you have any suggestion or example of the kind of data interaction you need from a template like that?

Well,

Suppose we want a web based UI for editing an email compaign to promoting an app of yours

For campaign: title, content, etc.

For recipients: you have to design something like Django's admin inline, user name, email, maybe facebook/twitter id.

Here a simple demo for inlines: http://admin:admin@demo.xadmin.io/host/hostgroup/add/ from the project https://github.com/sshwsfc/django-xadmin which is basically Django on steroids

Now recipients are growing, you can't hold them all on one page inline, you wanna filter the inline, but only on the client side.

Then you need pagination on the inline.

Then you need grouping recipients like folders

Next folders suck, let's re-organize them by tags.

Soon your product line expands, you have to support Android platform as well. Each user has installed either android or iOS app, or even both, so each user as associated one or more `device_type` attributes. Filter the inlines. Don't send iOS emails to Android users.

Then you want to set the campaign to iOS version with greater than 5.0 users. (How to design greater than or equal to logic visually?)

Now you want your message to be i18n supporting more languages, e.g. more collapsable textarea on the form

Now you want your message to be selected randomly from a pool of messages for A/B testing.

Then your messages are provided by a third party. You need a review board for external messages, as well as supporting inhouse messages.

I didn't even mention marketing feedback loops from real-time statistis, and that requires much more blood and tears making dashboards.

How to make a admin UI like that? The associated information grows with your business. Generic admin templates are not enough.

The basic problem is that those widgets, are not composable, nor nestable. even if nestable, not sortable.

Even if all goes well, widgets not splittable, but we often split data horizontally or vertically. And much more complex transformation like from a collection of items to uniformed array, nested array, dict (for grouping), sorted dict, nested sorted dict, dict with local & remote values, etc.

How many inline widgets can automatically support re-open itself in new window and communicate back with window.opener? What about switch from new window to in-page lightbox via history.js and ajax?

Great insight. I suppose such extensive admins require a really specific UI to be usable, and can only be solved on a case-by-case basis, while maintaining a constant feedback from the front-end user and the back-end data provider. Generic templates usually need both a visually attractive UI and easy-to-configure widgets to be marketable and sold. But it's worth trying developing a more intricate and data-focused interface.

I will remember your scenario while developing my Boostrap admin template. Thanks.

whenever you have your product ready: if you're thinking about selling it and if you want to try to avoid losing a big % because of marketplace fees...you can get in touch with me (info@html5admin.com) :)

That's because, functionally, that sort of interaction does not belong on a dashboard. Dashboards are meant to succinctly summarize what's going on under the hood. "Bakery 47 is running low on cinnamon rolls" && "Coffee shop on Main is your #1 seller this week" - Rolling up your sleeves and manipulating that data is best done in a bespoke screen/view.

dashboard is only a subset admin templates

They are mostly read-only, useful for OLAP data. Admin templates are useful for OLTP data.

That doesn't address use cases. A Dashboard is the first thing a user sees. If it's not, you're doing it wrong. Furthermore, in-depth slicing & dicing of data, manipulation, etc, should always be done in bespoke screens, not on a dashboard. Combining that stuff with an analytical view that the dashboard provides leads to kludge. Every single time.

i agree