Django admin customization for huge eshop administration - django

I'm facing to big project. It's gonna be eshop administration and I dont have much experiences with Django admin. I've realized only CRUDs.
My question is if is there a way and how much is that way painful to implement some advanced stuff in django admin - basically the stuff that u have to write by yourself like complicated product adminsitration incuding variants is.
In the other hand the administration will include common CRUDs and flat pages, so it would be cool if there is a way how to use django admin CRUDs and Flatpages app.
Would you guys go for django admin or in this case you would write the admin in your own way?
Thank you guys.
EDIT:
Update from customer: The project is gonna be just eshop admin. The frontends (eshops) arr gonna by implemented individually.

You really have to provide us more details on the project's specifications in order to answer your question.
What you should do is:
Outline all specifications and requirements for the project
Find if out if there are third party apps that meets some of those requirements
When you have those two things you can make a decision whether it's worth using Django Admin for your project.

Related

How to customize django admin panel

I am building an e-commerce website and I would like to customize my Django Admin Panel to look something like this:
I would like to re-design the entire admin page and add graphs, tables images etc. the same way you would do on the front-end. I have been searching online for hours for a solution but I can't find anything useful. Does anyone have any solution to this problem?
The django-admin pages can be customised, but not to the extent that you are hoping for. You would need to over-write a whole load of the built in django admin views, re-write a lot of the templates too.
By this point you would be re-writing so much of it, you would basically be writing your own admin anyway, and so it would be much much easier, not to use the admin app at all, and just write your own admin interface from scratch. From the docs:
The admin has many hooks for customization, but beware of trying to
use those hooks exclusively. If you need to provide a more
process-centric interface that abstracts away the implementation
details of database tables and fields, then it’s probably time to
write your own views.
Remember also, that the admin app is not designed to be a production ready interface. It should ideally, only be used by developers, so if you are needing something to be used by a wider group, the admin app probably isn't appropriate anyway.
Sorry that this probably isn't the answer you were hoping for, but it will definitely be much easier to do this yourself, than try and bolt it onto something that is going to get in your way every step of the way.

Can I extend django admin to one of the good looking bootstrap admin templates?

I am trying to use django as the platform for a website development. I was using wordpress so far. I liked its CMS and admin system. Can I make a function rich admin backend with django that has; pages, menus, categories, tags, posts, images etc. as the wordpress. In order to make it look good, is it possible to use boostrap or similar dashboard templates? How much of difficulty are you expecting for this project?
Looking forward for your opinions
Thanks
Django admin is a great utility that comes with django, which helps to create basic CRUD application very quickly.
Now customizing it can be somewhat difficult because it is tightly coupled.
Thought the docs are awesome and you can see if the customization will get your work done. There are many themes available such as django-suit, django-jet etc. which makes it even more awesome.
You might also want to have a look at django-cms and wagtail.
Hope it helps!

Django vs Django-CMS -business compare site

I've developing in django for the past few months and I find it extremely great.
My next project is a price-comparing site for local businesses - where each user can add business and comment on each.
The admin of the site won't be a programmer, but with basic knowledge in web and python.
Should I stick to the old familiar django or should I try it out?
Thanks :)
Matan.
django CMS is built on top of Django and meant to be integrated into existing Django applications or extended with new ones. So your question is flawed.
So instead ask yourself if you need CMS functionality (pages managed by your admins). It sounds like your main app (the compare bit) is better handled by a Django application, but maybe you want the site admin to be able to easily edit the About Us page etc, this is where django CMS could come in handy.

Should I use a blog app in Django?

I want to create my own admin panel and every users will can have their own blogs. I'm using a blog app called 'Zinnia', I liked it. Zinnia have some visual editors (WYMEditor, Tinymce) also have a tag system, etc. that I want to have in my admin panel.
I was wondering if should I create my own admin panel or blog app and integrate the visual editor programatically. What would be better?
Thanks for answers.
EDIT: My real question is: What's better?
create my admin and my blog app
create my admin integrating Zinnia or another blog app
use the django admin panel (but i want to customize the fully admin panel, so I guess that is not a good option)
Remembering, the users (not only admins) can post to their blogs. (this is the reason that I don't want to use the Django admin)
EDIT 2:
Exactly what I want: I want to use all the features (such as tagging, WYMEditor [I know i can implement this programmaticaly], etc.) of Zinnia (or another blog app) with my custom admin panel, with my buttons, my layout, my css, my everything!
Thanks for all answers, it's important for me.
Here is a simple tutorial for creating a django blog app:
http://lightbird.net/dbe/blog.html
If you are still learning django, I recommend it to create your own blog!!!
Creating a good Django blog application is straightforward, but tedious work, that can quite easily get unwieldy if you start implementing additional features such as multiple language support, linkback handling, search, sitemap generation, etc.
I definitely wouldn't suggest that you start from scratch. If your not completely satisfied by the full extent of possibilities or the initial feature set of Zinnia, you can check out all the Django blog applications on Django Packages.

Creating an entire web application using django admin

I was thinking that django admin is an utility to provide trusted administrators of the site, full access to the site's data model.
However, after going through django admin in detail, I understand that it is very powerful set of views and templates that one can use to create an entire application.
How often do you create an entire application using admin alone? Is it easier to create using views itself than customizing admin that much?
How about building prototype using admin. Do we even need to build prototype? The admin customization cannot be re-used in real application.
If I want to use a part of the admin code in real application (with different templates), is there some kind of scaffolding option available?
"The Admin is not your app."
If the customization goes beyond the trivial, write your own views.
In my experience, I leave the internal admin pages relatively untouched. Instead, I override the admin index template, where I put links to custom-written views when the user needs to do nontrivial reporting or form handling.
I have done something like that before. It was a CMS for a university completely implemented by extending Django admin. It turned out it was a bad design descision. I had to jump through hoops to do some things.
It really depends on what the requirements are for your application. If there needs to be lots of ajax or some specific workflow extending the admin will not be the right thing to do. But I think 60% of cases can be covered by extending the admin.
It's also excellent for building prototypes.
EDIT
OK, that was in the 0.96 days.
So far I've built 2 "big" sites that are in production completely on top of the new admin. These are mostly case management, data entry and reporting so they could be squeezed into the workflow of the admin. But, not without a big effort going into extending the base Site, ModelAdmin, InlineModelAdmin etc. The decision to go this way is we were pressed to do it quick. But in the first case it was a perfect fit for the requirements too. Both run on an intranet in the government sector. Both do their job fine. One with 200 tables handling tens of thousands of entries. The other one manages payments.
So, yes it's true. The admin is not your app. However, it's extendable enough although much of it is not documented. And it fits in most basic enterpresey workflows. So it's worth considering in a limited number of scenarios.
I disagree with most of the other answers.
Simply put, there is no match for what you get for free using the admin app.
Your first customization of the admin will be tough as you'll be facing a steep learning curve (you will need to deal with overriding templates, Managers, ModelAdmins, probably use database views, the CSS and JS, some additional forms and validation rules, etc...). But once that is done, you'll start to feel king in bending the admin system to your needs. I have built a complex inventory and accounting web application with data-entry, reporting, and permission system all based solely on the admin interface and back-end.
The Django Admin is incredibly flexible and can be overridden in multiple ways. Unfortunately there is more than one way to do the overriding and some of the techniques are not terribly well documented.
The good news is that the following strategy seems to work well:
Override, customize and subclass the admin app until it all starts feeling a little painful and at that point just drop into your own views where needed.
There's some useful links in my answer to this question
In short:
Try out the admin part for your needs. Modify the standard views. If there is something missing, you can always develop your own view.
For me, I can't imagine an entire (bigger than rolodex) application based only on django-admin.
A.