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Comment by codefisher | Hacker News Reader

I mentioned the admin interface as well. I wish it was easier to customise when you need something more user friendly, and not something that is just a GUI for accessing the database. But it is hard to get away from, since everything else by default plugs into it.

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After customizing the admin interface so that it could be used by the staff of a couple of organizations I wrote web sites for, I realized that it's much easier to write normal views for this. It's simple to use decorators to enforce staff logins on views. Really customizing the admin becomes pretty tortuous pretty fast. However, it's great to have available as an interface to the DB for the developer; not so much for the users.

Don't mind my personal plug, but you might be interested in taking a look at Smartmin: https://smartmin.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

(don't mind the stale release, just use master)

It is a much, much better admin-like tool to use for building CRUD views, with strong conventions on permissions, URL structures and template names. It really simplifies things and we've been using it internally for four years on a dozen different projects.

Can't imagine using Django without it.

Sounds neat but I'm having trouble figuring out what it does. Maybe you could include screenshots, and simple sample code showing how it's used?

I will also have to write normal views for it. I just would like some easy system for pluging those views all together nicely for, without having to do it myself. Also some extra stuff to take care of permissions when doing that. I eventually I think I will have to write my own such system to get what I want.

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