I really like StreamFields, but I don't want the baggage of Wagtail's Publishing system.
For example, consider a Forum community site. Instead of using CK Editor or BBCode, Markdown etc form input. I want to give users the option of StreamField based input to construct posts or replies
Is this possible? If yes, what steps would I need to take or edits to Wagtail do I need to do?
I'm guessing using a permission system while keeping the user as a limited admin would be the thing to do, since removing the user from admin doesn't seem to be possible since Wagtail is heavily reliant on Django Admin.
I'm guessing using a permission system while keeping the user as a
limited admin would be the thing to do, since removing the user from
admin doesn't seem to be possible since Wagtail is heavily reliant on
Django Admin.
If you want to reuse StreamFields, you probably want to use the Wagtail admin interface; doing otherwise is likely to be quite a bit of work. So users will need to be able to log in and have the wagtail_admin permission so they can access the admin interface. If you tried to use Page models for your forum, you are going to end up crossways of the way Wagtail's page permissions cascade. You could probably write your own admin views for regular users to add certain kinds of content.
But honestly, unless you have quite a bit of experience with Wagtail in its normal content management mode, I wouldn't suggest you try using it for this use case.
Related
The admin interface for editing (adding, deleting, changing) entries in the database is great. I am working on a system, based on HTML forms, to allow users to edit information relevant to them in the database. This will take a lot of work, and look less than professional. Is there a standard way to allow a logged in user to use an administration-interface-like page to edit their (and only their) entries in a DB/model?
You can probably do what you need by customizing django admin. In django admin you can define get_queryset method to restrict objects available for current user. See https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/2.1/ref/contrib/admin/#django.contrib.admin.ModelAdmin.get_queryset, example there matches pretty well to your task
One use case for overriding this method is to show objects owned by the logged-in user...
Recently I started using Django CMS, it turns out to be a great tool for web developer. But one thing I couldn't have achieved so far is creating a form for users so they could submit some content created with WYSIWYG editor. I thought maybe there's some easy way to add editor available in admin panel (the one you use with creating / modifying Text plugins), doesn't seem like that unfortunately.
Long story short - I'd like to enbable users to use the same WYISWYG editor available from admin panel, without giving them permission to access admin panel. Is it possible? Or do I have to use some additional extension so I could embed similiar editor on my Page(s)?
Maybe you should look into divio/djangocms-text-ckeditor. It offers a HTMLFieldto be parts of models and a TextEditorWidgetto be parts of your app's forms.
So based on the comments I assume, when you say "users", you mean anonymous site visitors that are not registered to the CMS? And you want to display a WYSIWYG form field to them to "submit some content"?
If my assumptions are correct, you just need to create an own plugin or maybe an app.
See http://docs.django-cms.org/en/release-3.4.x/how_to/custom_plugins.html
I want to use Django for a web application I'm building that will have an admin panel. I know that you need to just activate the admin app and you're ready to go. However, I would like to have a custom panel, I mean, I want to design the layout myself, I want to add menus and forms for the admin to insert new data in the database etc. Is it possible? or I should write a similar application that will have such features?
For more control over the layout (custom menus etc.) you should check django-admin-tools.
And if you take a look at Django's docs you'll learn that you can easily tweak and override most parts of the admin. For example here is a demonstration on how to use a custom form:
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/contrib/admin/#adding-custom-validation-to-the-admin
So the admin is pretty customizable. But the question if you should build your own app or reuse the admin depends pretty much on your specific needs. At least make sure you know in which directions the admin can be easily bend.
The sole purpose for Django's admin is to allow you to manipulate (add/edit/remove) data in your database. I think you should at least try to check what the admin is capable of before trying to reinvent the wheel. You'll soon discover the level of complex insight the admin allows you to have. Then you'll discover that making it yourself is unnecessary excess of work and you'll end up with modifying a couple of admin-templates and CSS styles.
Yes, you can customize Django Admin Panel, Django provides some sort of customization for showing database tables structure from their own, for that you can follow DJANGO ADMIN SITE DOC , it will really help you.
For the customizations beyond the Django admin site settings, you can customize admin panel add manual layout, by adding manual detailing in Django template files which are stored in Django environment, django/django/contrib/admin/templates/admin/index.html of your current Django version. You can update its HTML, CSS, and JS according to need.
I've been successfully using Django's admin panel for internal users for a while but I recently hit a brick wall while trying to customize it and I'm curious if I'm spending too much time on it. So, my question is:
Is Django's admin panel intended to just be temporary scaffolding, that is, to be used only during the initial development of the application and to be replaced by custom code similar to Rails' scaffolding?
Obviously by using the admin panel I get a lot of functionality for free and as new features are added I get those for free too. What do other people do?
I wouldn't say the admin is meant to be temporary scaffolding but it might not be the best choice for many cases. I've worked with a very large and well known media company that used the admin as the basis for the entire workflow interface for its producers and editors. Unfortunately, your decision making process about when or when not to use the admin will benefit largely from your overall knowledge about the internals of Django; you'll probably get stuck a few times before you gain the experience to know when not to get stuck. :p
The "customizability" of the admin can be somewhat subjective. I've seen teams bend it to their will but it also requires a pretty good working knowledge of the lower level-details of Models, Forms (and naturally things like ModelForms and FormSets), and templates. I think a lot of the conventional wisdom and best practices hasn't yet surfaced into organized documentation. Be prepared to do a lot of digging around in the source code. The good news is that you'll probably come away with a much deeper understanding of how to take advantage of some of the first-class entities in the framework. The bad news is your boss probably won't be happy that it took you most of a day to change single input on a form.
Recent enhancements have made it easier to place your own views under the admin URL space so you might consider an approach of writing your own views to suit your needs and sprinkling in links in appropriate places within the standard admin pages. I generally advise people who are newer to Django or who are just getting into admin customization to strongly consider just rolling your own administrative views. After all, Django already makes it ridiculously easy to create CRUD style apps and you won't have to feel like you're fighting against a rigid system whenever you want to change presentation or behaviors.
Django Admin is for things where there's no value in doing anything more than the default add/change/delete processing it offers.
Databases are full of lookup and administrative tables. The zip-code to state mapping, for example, that no end-user should see. The log of background batch job executions.
Your app will probably have some tables which are these sort of more-or-less "administrative" -- someone maintains them, but not the large community of users.
Your app will probably have some tables which are for end-users to add/change/delete. You might want to provide extensive customized pages for this activity.
Django grew up in the news business. Writers and editors prepare data (using the admin interface). Customers read the data through customized web pages.
We have administrative staff that use the admin pages. We have customized pages for our customers. We use both.
We provide default admin pages on almost everything to our internal admins. We provide default admin on selected tables to customer-side admins. And we provide carefully crafted application-specific pages for our customers.
I asked a similar question about 6 months ago when I was first starting out in Django.
Is it worth it using the built-in Django admin for a decent sized project?
For that particular application I opted not to use Django admin, and that was a very smart decision in hindsight. Since then, I've generally not used it, but sometimes there are situations when it's great. For me, it really depends on the users. If we are building a custom data-driven app for a client and are working off a feature set provided by them, I would never want to use the Django admin. In those cases, almost certainly they will have changes that could be a real pain to try to get working in the admin. And if it's an evolving project, these changes will become more and more of a hack and you'd probably end up having to start ripping out pieces into non-Django admin parts of the site, at which point there are now two interfaces for doing stuff.
However, if the clients are more of the mindset of accepting the way the app works, then the Django admin would be fine, assuming there's generally a 1:1 correspondence between your tables and the data they're dealing with.
As Brian Luft said, it's really easy to create interfaces for CRUD apps, so if you sense you'll need any customization in the future, it might be easiest just to write your own from the start. You can always keep the django admin around for your own needs as a super-user. That's usually what I do, so I can easily have table-level access to change fields that might not be shown in the normal user admin.
No, I wouldn't compare it to Rails' scaffolding. It's not clear from your question what kind of issues you are running into-- can you provide an example?
There's a lot of customization you can do to the admin by adding custom ModelAdmin classes: hide fields, show additional fields, allow for editing of related-items on the same page or limit/ filter the options that appear in a foreign key field. You can also make things easier for users to find by adding sorting, filters to the front page, search fields. Newer versions of Django also let you create your own custom commands that can be applied to multiple objects at once.
But if the problem isn't with the basic change list and edit form, you can completely customize those by creating model-specific templates and overriding the default admin templates.
No, you can for sure use it for administrating your site, but as Django says; only for trusted users. So if you create a cms, its great. Because (hopefully) the back end users will be trusted users!
I haven't been using Django too long, but I'm about to start a pretty hefty-sized project. I'm always nervous using fairly new frameworks (new to me) on large projects because I've been burned before. However, I'm pretty confident in Django...this will finally be the project that makes me leap from my home-grown PHP framework to a popular Python framework. (yay!)
Anyway, my question is whether or not the built-in Django admin is robust enough to use for a fully-fledged customer-facing interface (the clients will be using it themselves, not me). I see that it's pretty customizable, but I'm wondering if extensible enough to handle various non-standard cases. I don't have any concrete examples yet since I haven't started yet.
Has anyone used the Django admin for some pretty customized interfaces that non-programmer users use? Was it worth it? Would you rather have just created a home-grown admin interface specifically for the site?
Just to clarify, the users would be completely non-techy.
If I understand it correctly, you want to use the django admin for all users, to let them update the site.
If this is true, I think you may be using it in a different way from what was its main purpose, as you can get from the Django book (emphasis is mine):
For a certain class of Web sites, an
admin interface is an essential part
of the infrastructure. This is a
Web-based interface, limited to
trusted site administrators, that
enables the adding, editing and
deletion of site content.
If your users need to update content (like, let's say, adding a new article) then it may be OK.
But if you want to use it for any site interaction, then I think the user experience will not be as good.
I think a very nice example of how the admin can be used, and when it should not be used is in ReviewBoard: there, most of user actions are handled directly by the site, and only the configuration and management are then handled using the admin.
In the end, it is a matter of usability. If you think that it is OK for your application to have a different section to manage addition to the site, then Django's admin site may be a real time saver. In all other cases, maybe it is better to invest some time more.
My company has built a CMS on top of Django that handles numerous tasks (flat pages, blogs, members-only sections, importing and parsing data from external sites like youtube and flickr, mailing lists, albums songs and lyrics for artists, etc.) and so far we're still using the built-in admin. We have several very non-technical clients using it regularly.
You can go pretty far in customizing it with the admin.py files when you really get into it. The only things we've added are tinyMCE and Filebrowser to make those aspects easier for the end users.
I will say that we are working on a gallery module that is going to need a custom admin, though. Otherwise I've been pretty happy and impressed with how flexible and powerful Django's admin can be. And it's as user-friendly as you can think to make it.
It depends. The admin will let you customize quite a bit, with different groups of users having access to different tables, and if you give them access to different admin interfaces, you can even give them different sets of columns available on the tables. However, the admin isn't really set up to let you restrict users' row level access based on their authorization level. Once you've let them into a table, they can make changes to any object available to them.
You can customize widgets however you like by subclassing widget types (though the built-in filter_horizontal and raw_id_admin are indispensable and make this task simple for certain data types!)
So I guess it depends on what you mean by customers. If you mean the people who hired you to write the website (I think I'd call them clients rather than customers), then there's a good chance the admin will suit you just fine. If you mean the end users of a website, I would stick with hand-crafted django forms.
In general I view the Django admin as an interface to performing the tedious tasks of insert delete and editing. So, I'm not afraid of customizing it to a large extent (even if this means subclassing internal Django objects and passing them back to the admin interface at runtime), but be aware it will require you to read Django source (which fortunately isn't very hard to do).
So for me, the discriminator of using it or not is "insert, delete, update" of concepts that map very well to the database tables, not amount of user technical knowledge, amount I trust the users, or project size.