Has anyone implemented their own AdminSite? How easy/hard was the basic implementation?
I'm in the midst of building a "cms" that's going to be quite large and decently complex in some areas and I'm wondering if using something like AdminSite would save some time. I'd rather not have to make my own implementation for admin actions and inlines and the like (I know I can just use inline forms but that's not as simple as inlines = [Foo]).
When using a custom AdminSite, is further customization equivalent to customizing the standard Django admin?
You've read the admin site docs. It's a lengthy document, but two main hooks for adding custom functionality is through custom urls and modified standard views in your own AdminSite and ModelAdmin objects. Once you hook those in and the urls get mapped, it's just like building any other Django application, only that the templates aren't yours, so they're are a bit hard to manage and take getting used to. But it allows you to do additional gymnastics, like adding a form wizard to the admin site or splitting everything into multiple forms and rendering them in a single HTML form element in the templates, doing custom handling of GET/POST requests, etc.
I've used it in the past to create views for displaying custom reports and to create custom editing scenarios for the staff. My opinion is that you should KISS as much as possible. The admin site is all about generic views and generic presentation. Do expand, but be cautious if you override template blocks and think twice before you override something that's not wrapped in a block. Certain admin site features have certain presentation assumptions and the JS client app that's shipped with Django makes some too (that's what I've figured when working with adding dynamic inline models way back), so it'd be quite an undertaking if you'd like to roll a completely different presentation.
The answer in any case is YES! The admin site will provide you with more features for managing your model data interactively. I don't know how extensively you'd need to customize the admin, but there are CMSs, dedicated admin apps and admin integrated apps that are a real eye-opener. Django CMS, as I recalled, has been praised as the best open-source Django CMS out there and from what I can see it rolls it's own cust change/list views. Rosetta is an admin site only app that allows you to edit your translation files interactively and has an exhaustive admin interface! If you shop around on bitbucket and github you'll find many more examples, it should help you figure out best how much effort you'd need to put into it.
Both
If you are OK with it not doing exactly what you want its pretty much done for you automatically. If you need fine grain control over certain things it can be hard to customize without knowing the internals of the admin code.
the django admin is more of a one size fits all kind of ui which may not be intuitive for use in some cases ..
customizing its look is easy but extending it is some how hard. you are better off designing your own views in that case.
Related
First sorry for my poor English.
I came from asp.net mvc. Now I use django with nanoboxio
In asp, I can create sections like below.
Create model and add it to dbcontext
Right click controller folder and create new controller with views.
Modify as you wish
For now, I know Django can create admin interface for your model. I try and happy with it. but i want to develop it.
I want to for example;
Create a post model.
Create a admin interface for it.
Copy generated admin interface controller and views to another app
Modify it
How can I do that?
Django's MVC is quite different to ASP.
Django's MVC pattern is less strict so you sort of combine the view and the controller in the views.py. However, if you want to change the Admin, the Django docs are quite nice here: docs.djangoproject.com
If you want to create a custom admin functionality the docs should give you a first idea and if you're planning to create a blog, I would advice you to use an existing plugin such as Zinnia. There, you can find the desired functionalities and modify them instead of building them from scratch.
Also, there are a couple of tutorials on how to build reusable apps and they usually include a detailed guideline how to implement admin functionalities there. Just look it up on google.
I hope that helps you!
I'm coming from an iOS background to Django. As an app developer, I'm used to clearly defined MVC architecture. My storyboard contains my views. My view controllers contain my logic, and my model exists in an object-relational mapper (ORM) framework or database.
On the web, the separation of responsibility seems less clear cut. Sure, databases and ORMs exists. HTML seems to be my views. Django Models seem to be just that. But where is the controller?
Where does my business logic live?
As the Django FAQ itself points out, Django doesn't quite follow an MVC approach, at least not in a straightforward way. (They argue that Django itself is the controller, but that's not really how I think about MVC.)
The "controllers" in Django are basically what Django calls views. So you have your model classes, which are the M obviously. The templates/HTML are basically the V in MVC. Django views (either functions or classes) are effectively callbacks that run for a particular URL, and they tend to be where a lot of the logic is. So for example, you'll have a Django view called get_foo_bar that runs when someone makes a GET request to /foo/bar, and the Django view effectively becomes the C in MVC.
So long story short, your logic often goes in your Django views.
Django has controllers that are stored in views.py files, this naming leads to some confusion for newbies with some sort of MVC background, you can read about it here: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.8/faq/general/#django-appears-to-be-a-mvc-framework-but-you-call-the-controller-the-view-and-the-view-the-template-how-come-you-don-t-use-the-standard-names
On the website, it says this:
One of the most powerful parts of
Django is the automatic admin
interface. It reads metadata in your
model to provide a powerful and
production-ready interface that
content producers can immediately use
to start adding content to the site.
In this document, we discuss how to
activate, use and customize Django’s
admin interface.admin interface.
So what? I still don't understand what the Admin interface is used for. Is it like a PHPMYADMIN? Why would I ever need this?
Let's say you create a model called Entry. IE an extremely simple blog. You write a view to show all the entries on the front page. Now how do you put those entries on the webpage? How do you edit them?
Enter the admin. You register your model with the admin, create a superuser and log in to your running webapp. It's there, with a fully functional interface for creating the entries.
Some of the uses I can think of -
Editing data or Adding data. If you have any sort of data entry tasks, the admin app handles it like a breeze. Django’s admin especially shines when non-technical users need to be able to enter data.
If you have understood above point, then this makes it possible for programmers to work along with designers and content producers!
Permissions - An admin interface can be used to give permissions, create groups with similar permissions, make more than one administrators etc. (i.e. if you have a login kinda site).
Inspecting data models - when I have defined a new model, I call it up in the admin and enter some dummy data.
Managing acquired data - basically what a moderator does in case of auto-generated content sites.
Block out buggy features - Also if you tweak it a little, you can create an interface wherein say some new feature you coded is buggy. You could disable it from admin interface.
Think of the power this gives in a big organization where everyone need not know programming.
I have been playing for a couple of days with Django Admin to explore it, but I am still clueless of how it can be customized in the way we need.
Every time I look for any help for the customization in the admin panel, what I find is, a bunch of articles on various communities and forums, explaining how to customize the template, the lists items, the the column views etc. But that should not be called Django Customization.
If I need to make even a small change in the User functionality or any modification to the auth module. It takes a lots of efforts even in figuring out how that can be done.
Is Django that difficult to customize or its just lack of the help available over internet for this or its me who is moving in the wrong direction ?
You are not providing enough details on what you want to achieve, so it's difficult to say how complex the task is. You might also want to consider not modifying the admin site at all and building your own views where appropriate.
However, here are some good links to get you started:
Customizing the Django Admin
Doing more with the Django admin
Extending Django's User Admin
Personally, if you want a site to look like the admin, why not pull the templates and styles and use them, build your own views for what you need. Gobs of documentation and forum help is there for that. I like the idea of customizing the admin, but honestly, I have been doing it for awhile on a project and time and time again I think to myself, if this was built in the standard MVC (or MTV) manner with free templates online, copied admin ones, or some professionally made ones, and built with the plethora of addons and my code, it would be much easier!!! And, when you decide that request/response isn't cutting it, and you want to add lots of JavaScript, you'll be glad. I know. I have had to put all sorts of JavaScript on our Admin project. Mostly because it's impossible to make the admin do what we want, so we fix it with JavaScript once it is on screen. When you find yourself writing an Ajax based system, you'll wonder why you have the admin at all.
If I could start this project over, I might not even use Django, but I probably would. I most certainly won't used the Admin.
Now, if you are building an basic CRUD type site that doesn't have style-eyed users, then Django with grappelli, and some elbow grease will get the job done. Remember, Django is a collection of Python scripts. Just override everything you can, and you'll get there, if you aren't too ambitious.
Django Admin is easy to customize if your requirements match what is customizable in Django. If you need fancy features that are not out-of-the-box functionality you either need to find a plugin that does it, or implement it yourself by subclassing the appropriate classes. Which can be difficult, and requires good understanding of the internals of Django.
So in summary: it makes it easier to setup an admin, but if you need anything special that's not out of the box: you got a steep learning curve.
Depending on your requirements you can choose to use django or not. Anything that requires a lot of functional speccing is better of implemented manually.
It's very easy . Just copy default template to project and change HTML and some variable location
Just see in this vedio
https://youtu.be/NTZfjwf4F8A
Pretty new to this scene and trying to find some documentation to adopt best practices. We're building a fairly large content site which will consist of various media catalogs and I'm trying to find some comparable data / architectural models so that we can get a better idea of the approach we should use using a framework we've never made use of before. Any insight / help would be greatly appreciated!
"data / architectural models so that we can get a better idea of the approach we should use using a framework we've never made use of before"
Django imposes best practices on you. You don't have a lot of choices and can't make a lot of mistakes.
MVC (while a noble aspiration) is implemented as follows:
Data is defined in "models.py" files using the Django ORM models.
urls.py file maps URL to view function. Pick your URL's wisely.
View function does all processing, making use of models and methods in models
Presentation (via HTML templates) invoked by View function. Essentially no processing can be done in presentation, just lightweight iteration and decision-making
The model is defined for you. Just stick to what Django does naturally and you'll be happy.
Architecturally, you usually have a stack like this.
Apache does two things.
serves static content directly and immediately
hands dynamic URL to Django (via mod_python, mod_wsgi or mod_fastcgi). Django apps map URL to view functions (which access to database (via ORM/model) and display via templates.
Database used by Django view functions.
The architecture is well-defined for you. Just stick to what Django does naturally and you'll be happy.
Feel free to read the Django documentation. It's excellent; perhaps the best there is.
first, forget all MVC mantra. it's important to have a good layered structure, but MVC (as defined originally) isn't one, it was a modular structure, where each GUI module is split in these tree submodules. nothing to use on the web here.
in web development, it really pays to have a layered structure, where the most important layer is the storage/modelling one, which came to be called model layer. on top of that, you need a few other layers but they're really not anything like views and controllers in the GUI world.
the Django layers are roughly:
storage/modelling: models.py, obviously. try to put most of the 'working' concepts there. all the relationships, all the operations should be implemented here.
dispatching: mostly in urls.py. here you turn your URL scheme into code paths. think of it like a big switch() statement. try hard to have readable URLs, which map into user intentions. it will help a lot to add new functionality, or new ways to do the same things (like an AJAX UI later).
gathering: mostly the view functions, both yours and the prebuilt generic views. here you simply gather all the from the models to satisfy a user request. in surprisingly many cases, it just have to pick a single model instance, and everything else can be retrieved from relationships. for these URLs, a generic view is enough.
presentation: the templates. if the view gives you the data you need, it's simple enough to turn it into a webpage. it's here where you'll thank that the model classes have good accessors to get any kind of relevant data from any given instance.
To understand django fundementals and the django take on MVC, consult the following:
http://www.djangobook.com/
As a starting point to getting your hands dirty with ...
"...trying to find some comparable data / architectural models"
Here is a quick and dirty way to reverse engineer a database to get a models.py file,
which you can then inspect to see how django would handle it.
1.) get an er diagram that closely matches your target. For example something like this
http://www.databaseanswers.org/data_models/product_catalogs/index.htm
2.) create an sql script from the er diagram and create the database,
I suggest Postgre, as some MySQL
table type will not have forgien key constraints, but in a pinch MySQL or SQLITE
will do
3.) create and configure a django app to use that database. Then run:
python manage.py inspectdb
This will at least give you a models.py file which you can read to see how django attempts
to model it.
Note that the inspect command is intended to be a shortcut for dealing with legacy
database when developing in django, and as such is not perfect. Be sure to read the
following before attempting this:
http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/django-admin/#ref-django-admin