Is it possible to customise the look of grappelli? - django

I'm building a site using Django and Grappelli. One of the requirements is to have a consistent theme across the entire site, both front end and admin interfaces.
At the least, the two things I would like to do are replace sections of the top bar to include the sites name (and logo) and customise the CSS for required fields to make them more obvious.
For example here: I'd like to replace "Grappelli" with "MySitename"
And below you can see the faint bolding indicates a required field, and I'd like to add some styling to make this stand out more:
Unfortunately, I can't scrap grappelli as I'm using some of its advanced functionality like foreign key autocompletes and sortables, so that's not an option.
Sadly the documentation doesn't really go into this detail regarding customisation and I'd rather not have to fork and override sections of Grappelli just for some small visual changes.
Is there any way to easily achieve this?

to update the name just add GRAPPELLI_ADMIN_TITLE = "MySitename" in your settings file
https://django-grappelli.readthedocs.org/en/latest/customization.html

Related

How can I reuse Django admin search feature?

I'm developing an application with Django.I'm using Django admin's search feature like this:
class ProductAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
search_fields = ('image_name', 'product_name', )
And it gives a very nice search on these columns. Now I want to use this search in my views and inside my code. I mean I want to reuse this search which Django uses for the admin page in my code.
I've read the code of ModelAdmin class but I couldn't reuse it, because it uses some objects from other layers of Django.
So I couldn't figure out how can I do this.
I found an answer to this. My main concern was being able to use Django admin search because it was completely identical to what I needed and not because of I wanted to adhere to the "write once" philosophy. So I read the code and copied the part which was doing the search thing. I removed some error detection parts and general purpose codes and passed the variables which it needed to work correctly and then it worked.

Django CMS custom file rendering - extra plugin necessary?

I want to allow the users of a django-CMS to edit the background image in one of my CMS_TEMPLATES using the filer admin. How can I achieve this in a clean way, but with minimum of code and database tables?
My current solution is to (mis-)use the cmsplugin_filer_file by writing a custom template for it. The disadvantage is that I'll maybe want to use this plugin in a different way one day, and I think one cannot have several templates for one plugin.
A cleaner alternative would be to write a custom cmsplugin with a model containing a FilerFileField and nothing else. But this will require more lines of code and will create a new database table.
Is there a better solution which I didn't think of yet?
I hope, this question can be answered, not just discussed...
Maybe have a look at page extensions. This a new 3.0 feature:
http://django-cms.readthedocs.org/en/develop/extending_cms/extending_page_title.html

Single model for storing django application-wide options

I have a set of top-level configuration data fields that I want to be able to set within django admin for each deployment of my django app. I only want one set of these.
Example fields: site_logo, contact_person, address, facebook_url, twitter_url
The problem is that Django Admin is geared towards tables (lists) of models, so its not a good fit for this type of singular configuration model. I really only want one of these models to exist for the whole site, and to be able to click into it from admin and edit the various fields.
It seems i've come across a 3rd party app in the past to accomplish this but can't find it anywhere. Part of the problem is I'm finding it difficult to find the right words to google. Any ideas?
It looks like django-values will do what you're looking for.
Other possible contenders:
http://github.com/sciyoshi/django-dbsettings (doesn't look maintained)
http://github.com/jqb/django-settings
Have a look at django-livesettings it sounds like it might fit.
Not that i have used it, but i have heard good things about django-constance.
And there are even some more options listed in the Configuration-Grid on Django Packages.

Django strategy for automatically suggesting matching content

I'm looking at porting a custom-written PHP CMS into Django. One of the features the CMS currently has is an image upload function. I write an article, tag it with information, then choose a photo for it. If the system has any photos which have been added to articles with tags in common with the new one, it will suggest the photo for that article too. If there are no matches then a new image can be added.
In case this doesn't make sense, let's say I tag an article as Bruce Springsteen, The Beatles and Led Zeppelin. Next time I add an article with the tag The Beatles, it should suggest I use the image added for the first article.
What would be the best Django-applicable way to implement this? I've looked at the Photologue app and have integrated it, and I know it has tagging support (the problem here is that I'm using django-taggit, whereas Photologue supports django-tagging). One approach could be simply building it myself -- when a user uploads an article, I run a hook after they save it to associate the tags with the image. I'm just not sure how to then autosuggest an image in the admin tools based on that info.
Any ideas/approaches greatly appreciated.
This is almost certainly something you're going to have to build yourself. Django has a moderate number of libraries out there (that you've clearly already found). Unlike other solutions, it doesn't have a lot of things that get you 100% to your desired solution (whereas something like Drupal might get you 100% of the way there).
What you will probably need to do (at a high level) is something like this:
Create an AJAX view that takes the current tags as an argument and does a query on the existing posts to see what tags match and returns images from those posts.
Use jQuery/javascript on your view to call your AJAX view on the page as tags are added
Use jQuery to update a <div> on your page and show all the images that your view returned
Here is a similar example that might help get you started.
You might look into django-ajax as a helper library for your requests, but it definitely isn't necessary.
The hook between the your image module and any other django module can be implemented using django's contenttypes framework which also provides some useful instance methods for returning related/hooked objects.

Should I modify/extend the admin interface, or write my own CRUD views/templates?

I'm trying to write a simple CRM app in Django; partly as a learning exercise and partly for in-house use.
My schema is slightly complex, as rather that have a single Contact model (with a home phone, work phone, home email, etc.), I have stripped down Cntact model plus a Phone model, an Email model, etc., with a ForeignKey pointing back to a Contact. The point is to let Contacts have an arbitrary number of phone numbers, email addresses, etc. Simple, right?
I have some working views and templates for displaying the data - no issues there. And with only a very small amount of poking at admin.py I have a um...eight different TabularInlines set up, and the admin interface works to create and edit the data...but it's ugly and clunky to the point of unusability, and of course there's no conception of permissions or anything. I'm also not really a fan of having a completely different interface for displaying and searching through the data than for editing and adding contacts...I'd like as much as possible to be done inline, so that I can search for a name, look at the record, click "add note", have it popup a form, fill in the details, click submit, and be done, all with AJAXy goodness so there's no page reloads.
Question: Should I plug away at modifying the admin interface to try and make it usable for a user-facing app? And if so, can anyone point me to a good guide or example where someone has really changed the admin interface to make it work for user-facing CRUD operations?
Or should I just go ahead and write my own CRUD views? And if so, can anyone point me to a good guide or example where someone has written custom CRUD views that work with lots of ForeignKeys and inlines? Ideally I want a form that displays a single Contact, all his Email records, plus a blank form to add a new Email record, plus a button to add more blank forms, plus his Phone records, plus a blank form, and so on for all 8 of my associated models.
(Or am I thinking about this all wrong? Any advice appreciated.)
For our intranet, we use ModelAdmin subclasses (not mounted on the admin site via admin.site.register) for most of our C(R)UD views. By using custom templates for the views, it doesn't look like Django admin at all. What is very convenient though, is that it already handles all the validation/saving for us.
In general, I found admin-"hacking" quite useful to quickly write up C(R)UD views and usually with relatively small changes to your ModelAdmin subclass, you can make it work for your use case.
So I'd vote for use ModelAdmin, but not the one you use in admin, hook a different template and come up with some fancy CSS.
I successfully created a software on top of admin.
The admin hooks (these days) allow very fine-grained customizations, i.e. in general you only need to touch what you want to change.
The changes can go from a trivial cosmetic adjustment to a complete swap-out:
If you provide templates/admin/base.html your admin site can look any way you like. And of course, a navigation bar at the top could include links to some of your own views. Watch out not to hardcode URLs in your links, always reverse.
You can overload ModelAdmin's "change_view", "changelist_view" etc. and swap them for your own views. For example I replaced a default changelist and its simple filtering with a search interface that allows dynamic queries to be built, result columns to be customized by the user, and loading/saving of these searches. That didn't affect any of the other views of that ModelAdmin.
Overloading a ModelAdmin's "get_urls()" let's you rewrap existing admin urls to go to your own views. I did the latter for one model where I wanted the simple Add screen to be replaced by a totally customized Wizard (only leaning on ModelForm).
Don't forget the simplest approach, esp. regarding your "AJAXy goodness": Just define "css" and "js" in your ModelAdmin's Meta. Want to move an inline from the bottom to sit between third and fourth field, and that's not possible via parameters? A one-liner in jquery.
Check out "django-grappelli" for an example of how to improve admin look and feel.
What did you mean by "and of course there's no conception of permissions or anything"?