As an exceptionally mediocre programmer who routinely creates extensive admin customisations I dispute this.
Seriously. Where does this meme come from? The admin is remarkably easy to customize for the most part. It's biggest flaws are incomplete documentation and a few monolithic methods/templates mostly around changelists.
from django.contrib import admin
from django.forms import Textarea
from .models import *
# Register your models here.
class BotTextInline(admin.StackedInline):
model = BotReplyContent
extra = 1
fieldsets = [
(None, {'fields': ('message_type', 'text', ('template_text', 'example_text',), 'order',)}),
('Actions and inputs', {'classes': ('collapse,'), 'fields': ('action_type', 'input_type',)})
]
# readonly_fields = ['input_type_ptr']
class BotReplyAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
fieldsets = [
(None, {'fields': ('state', 'intent', 'context', 'description', 'next_state',)}),
]
formfield_overrides = {
models.CharField: {'widget': Textarea()}
}
list_display = ('state', 'intent', 'context', 'description',)
save_as = True # lets you save the content on screen as a new id
inlines = [BotTextInline]
admin.site.register(BotReply, BotReplyAdmin)Yes, you have to know what the class fields do. But you just saved yourself days of having to make your own CRUD view from scratch.
You're getting free authentication for an admin + free UI + a fully customizable list view + customizable create/update view + delete with a useful confirmation dialog + trivial field search + trivial filters of all sorts include date drill-downs.
It's a huge amount of things to do by hand.
I haven't found this myself to be honest. Usually you have to trawl through several stackoverflow posts and evaluate several different ways to do things you would expect to be simple. I don't have many examples in mind right now except showing image thumbnails, dealing with base64 image uploads and automatically resizing image uploads were way more cumbersome to implement than I would have expected. Most solutions we arrived at felt hacky for tasks you would think would be built in by now but I don't have a better framework in mind for CRUD work.
The default admin interface is really good though as well as the database migration tooling.
I've found the easy stuff to be very easy to do in the Django admin, and every time I've tried to do something off the beaten track, it's taken me days instead of the hours or minutes it feels like it should do.
Any of these would be good examples of things that feel like they should be easy, but aren't:
* Adding a link to a custom page onto the frontpage of the admin, ideally under a custom "App" header. * Creating a read-only view onto related objects (impossible in some situations, depending on the direction of the FKey relationship, annoying in others). * Presenting a form for creating nested one-to-one objects along with a parent.
I'm sure that if you routinely make modifications to the Django Admin it gets easier; the second time on any of these items is 10-100 times quicker for me.
I'd blame the poor code discoverability of the template-based system, poor documentation, and lack of a broad corpus of examples for making this harder than it could be.
The Django admin is meant for development. Ofc, it can be used by non-devs and I've seen a multimillion dollar business that mainly uses the builtin admin to manage their main product. However, there's always that point when customising something that is fundamentally different than what your needs are doesn't make sense.
I dispute this. And the community is pretty split on it too.
This one's simple—just override base_site.html.
As for the others, I'm not really sure I understand what creating a read-only view / form for nested 1-1 objects means, but I'm sure there's a decent, not so crazy solution out there.
And if your changes break in a future version of Django, how exactly is anyone going to be able to debug that? Having to override admin templates that are at best only semi-documented is incredibly hacky.
But, if experience is any guide, despite lots of tinkering with the admin, Django has yet to break anything I’ve customized in the admin (I’ve been using Django since 0.96). YMMV.
In many years of working with Django I have not really seen a significant breaking change in the admin unless you override private methods.