Should I use the Django admin for user submitted content? - django

I'm creating a site that will allow users to authenticate via Facebook and create content.
Should I use the Django admin interface for content creation or would it be smarter to create my own interface. If I should roll my own are there any good tutorials about this?

You can use admin login page and with custom URL redirection. Here is the working example for facebook authentication.
https://github.com/sivaa/django-social-auth-facebook

As a general rule, the django admin is best for validating your models during development and testing; and should not be used as a front end user interface.
Since each site/application has their own unique requirements, it is difficult to recommend a tutorial. Once you are familiar with django, you will find the following libraries helpful:
django-bootstrap-toolkit - this integrates the the excellent bootstrap css/javascript framework in django.
django-social-auth - allows your users to login using their social network credentials.
pinax project - a collection of common utilities for developing just about any kind of front end website.
For customizing the existing admin application:
grappelli - a custom skin for the admin
django-frontendadmin - edit models in the front end using template tags
django-admin-tools - customized widgets and UI elements for the admin application

Related

Django views accessible in the admin site

I would like to embed front end views in my django admin site at any possible specified locale, maybe in a class or site admin dashboard;anywhere I feel is the best option.. Tried out a few git projects but seems they are not compatible with current django versions..any one offering any idea?!
The Django Admin site is intentionally a separate site, with its own views.
In any app you can make functions that compute various values; but the Admin for that app will need to define its own views, using whatever functions you like.

create an admin's like application in django

Im really confused about what is all i need to consider for creating a django aplication with almost similar functionality to it's own admin.
The index page should deploy the list of models the user has access to modify or create...almost the same as when you put admin.site.register(MyModel) but with permission restriction. Im not sure how should i ckeck permissions, and show 1 ,2 or many "ModelAdmis" on my main page.
btw admin users are redirected to the admin index page, non-admins go to my page
Before you consider creating a django admin from scratch, you should read the answers to this question Django Admin app or roll my own?
I couldn't find any resource on how to create a django admin from scratch, but here's what you should do if this is your first time overriding a framework's functionality (in my humble opinion):
Understand and make sure you are comfortable with the django admin app
start from the docs https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.7/#the-admin
Head over to the django admin app source code so you can start reading the internals of the functionality you want to implement/override in your new admin app.
source code can be found here https://github.com/django/django/tree/master/django/contrib/admin
(this may involve reading other apps source code too)
After those two steps you should have an idea on how the admin app is implemented and it's dependencies, then you can start creating your custom admin app.
an example on how this may go can be found in this qestion:
How to override Django admin's views?
If you are building something new, try to separate the UI from the backend. You can build your UI using react, angular or whatever and interact with django using the API. To build the API you can use the Django Rest Framework.
Don't use the Django Admin as a public interface. Use that only for the admins!
If you start to use the Django Admin as interface for your public site, you'll fight with the package to tailor and secure the views to avoid destructive actions. What happen if you forget a readonly field? What if the user deleted something ON_CASCADE?
Building the UI you are totally free and you can customise easily everything without fighting the django admin package (it's awesome package but is not provided for public use)

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.

Integrate existing blog code into Django-CMS?

If I already have a blog app done with Django and I want to use it with my new Django CMS site, is it okay to simply drop it into my new Django CMS project as a decoupled app and match anything /blog/ to the blog app as apposed to a Django CMS plugin? I guess what I need to know is when is it best to write my Django app as a plugin vs an entire app?
Thx
JeffC
Yes, but you don't just drop it into the urls.py, instead you can write an AppHook to tie your blog's URL scheme to a particular page in your CMS.
Plugins on the other hand are useful if you want to inserts particular aspects of you app into other page's placeholders - for example to show your latest 3 posts on the frontpage.
You might also want to include your blog's paths in a breadcrumb or menu on your site - in that case you need to write a custom Menu too.
Finally, it might also be useful to make use of django cms's placeholders in you blog model. His would allow you to post a variety of content via plugins.

How to authenticate against Django from Drupal?

I have a medium sized Drupal 6 site running (around 5 million page views per month and more than 30K registered users) and I need to integrate OSQA, a Django application, with it. I already have many users, roles and permissions in my Drupal database and I'd like to point the Django app to use the sign up and login pages I already have in Drupal to give my users a single point on entrance.
I want to keep the Django authentication part because I think OSQA would work better. I also have performance reasons in mind, the Drupal site already gets a lot of traffic and has a very busy database and I think that using a separate database for Django would help.
After some research I think I could make the Drupal sign up and login pages call Django in the background to sign up or login to the Django app. I plan to do this writing a couple of views in Django, one for sign up and another for login, and Drupal would post the username and password to those views. Of course I'd need to disable CSRF in Django for those views and probably also post some secret key that only my Drupal and Django applications know about to avoid external sites trying to use this "unprotected" Django views.
I know that my Django application may need some user data from Drupal at some points and I'm planning on using the Drupal services module for that.
Would this be a good approach? Any suggestions?
Thanks a lot!
Are there any plugins for OSQA to expose an authentication service that Drupal can talk to? (OpenID or similar).
Alternatively, check out Drupal's ldap_integration module for an example of a module that uses an external authentication service. Consider that you will need to create Drupal user accounts for each login.
Finally, why not just build the essential parts of OSQA's functionality with Drupal? Seems like the key functionality could be replicated quite easily using Taxonomy, Vote Up and Userpoints/User Badges... potentially easier to do than shared authentication, especially on a large site.
I once created a very simple [sql_authentication][1] module, which you can probably simply re-create for a more recent version of Drupal.
The idea is simple: provide Drupal with an alternative authentication callback.
In that callback-function, just check against the Django database, and return TRUE if you think the user is correct.
You could look at how openid.module (in core) extends the user-authentication for a simple example.
If you can post to the Django form, you may be able to use drupal_http_request to handle the call to Django. After using the ldap_integration module for a while, I worked on a custom authentication module that calls a Java-based REST authentication API using drupal_http_request. If you're interested in the code, let me know.