// the find
PanJiaChen/vue-element-admin
:tada: A magical vue admin https://panjiachen.github.io/vue-element-admin
A Vue 2 admin dashboard template with an exhaustive feature set: role-based permissions, i18n, Excel import/export, rich text editing, drag-and-drop tables, ECharts, and more. It targets developers who need a starting point for internal tools or management systems and don't want to wire up every UI pattern from scratch.
The permission system is well thought out — both route-level guards and directive-level (`v-permission`) element hiding are implemented, which covers the two cases that actually come up in real apps. The plop-based code generator (`plopfile.js`) for scaffolding new views and store modules is a genuine time-saver. Excel export via `Export2Excel.js` wraps xlsx cleanly and handles merged headers, which is a pain to get right. The component library is deep — drag kanban, split pane, image cropper, sticky header — most teams end up needing at least a few of these.
It's stuck on Vue 2 and Element UI 2.x, both of which are past end-of-life. Vue 2 hit EOL in December 2023; building a new project on it today means you're already in maintenance debt before you write a line of business logic. The mock layer uses Mock.js in the dev server, which is fine for demos but gives a false sense that the API contract is validated — it isn't. The i18n story is a mess: the main branch dropped i18n support after v4.1.0 and you have to switch to a separate branch, which won't stay in sync forever. Last commit was October 2024 and the issue tracker is largely unattended, so bugs you hit are yours to fix.