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Comment by olau | Hacker News Reader

When you're a Django beginner, yes, it can be annoying to go from something that's just super easy to having to stitch together something yourself. I'm not sure what exactly causes this feeling, but I did learn that you need to have the right perspective on some things and either let it go or find some other way.

For instance, in my experience the admin site is best thought of as glorified DB UI. If you need something more than what it can offer out of the box, you should switch to coding it yourself, or live with a quick hack.

I think that most of the time, Django just gets out of the way. At least if you stay away from the inheritance spaghetti that is class-based views. Use the functions, Luke. :)

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> For instance, in my experience the admin site is best thought of as glorified DB UI. If you need something more than what it can offer out of the box, you should switch to coding it yourself, or live with a quick hack.

Agreed. My biggest Django headaches ultimately resulted from me trying to make the admin console do more than it's meant to do.

There are certainly limitations to the admin console/module, but it is still rather amazing. The amount of stuff that it will allow you to do is pretty impressive.

Sure, you easily get into a situation where you're out of luck using the admin module, but there are also entire classes of problems that can be solved using only the build in admin functionality.

Yeah, the trick I've learned is to design my models in a way that I know will work well in the admin. It's a little backwards, but it means I can keep using the admin.

> either let it go or find some other way.

With Django as soon as I have anything to do with a database I seem to hit this with the ORM. So I start working around it. Next thing you know it all seems to fall apart because of how coupled the rest of the application is to Django's assumptions about views and entities in the DB.

So "You gave up instead of reading the docs.": I go back to flask, or recently FastApi where you have to figure your schemas and access patterns out for yourself in advance instead of building thorough and deep knowledge on how to deactivate parts of Django when they become redundant. Opinion my own, results may vary, IANA your dev, etc

Flask with something like Flask-Security or Flask-Admin is my go-to

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