We're using django-admin interface for the backoffice of our own apps, but it we do expose it to our clients.
I'm considering going with either django-admin-tools or grappelli, to conveniently add modules and additional interactivity to the dashboard and data views.
What are your experiences?
django-admin-tools seems to be less intrusive. When I checked it, Grappelli broke some of admin-site extensions or widgets. Maybe they fixed it, but I'm alredy using DAT on my projects.
If I had to summarize: DAT is more about functionality; Grappelli is a more about style. So whatever fits you, best, go with it. Being a design-driven company, we ended up going with Grappelli.
My company did this analysis when we decided to use Django admin as a client-facing backend for a CMS Product. DAT offers some interesting functionality, some of which is duplicated in grappelli and some of which is not. Grappelli offers a few interesting additions of its own. In the end, we went with grappelli because of the really nice styling. My recommendation is to try both. Early on, we included both in the project, set up their respective dashboards, and it took about 30 seconds to switch between the two.
The commenter is right about grappelli needing to be in sync with django. I made the mistake of upgrading django without checking with grappelli, and it broke several things. The latest version of grappelli supports Django 1.4 and we'll be upgrading them together.
You will need to keep Django and grappelli in sync... The current version of Django is 1.4, but the current version grappelli supports 1.3. There is a branch that supports 1.4 however. If you are willing to support the minor hassle of managing this, grappelli offers some nice enhancements and a slicker look - starting with being able to set the title to the admin interface without copying and editing the admin template.
Depending on what you are doing, nice DateTime pickers (with "Today" and "Now" buttons) as well as sortable inlines can be very convenient.
Here is a little more up to date answer:
I have been using both but now am slowly moving towards grapelli, especially for new projects. Grapelli has for the most part caught up with django admin tools in terms of creating custom dashboards and menus. I still haven't seen all the features like draggable panels. Grapelli has better support and this can be seen by the repository activity. It was first to support Django 1.7 and at the time of me writing this, DAT did not offer that support yet. The reported bugs also do not get patched very often. I am also liking the way Grapelli looks and it is used in Mezzanine, my favourite cms.
Here are the two repositories if you wish to look:
https://bitbucket.org/izi/django-admin-tools/overview
https://github.com/sehmaschine/django-grappelli
Hope this helps.
Related
I was looking for a tagging/categorization app for a Django project. In past I have used django-tagging and django-taggit. Looks like they are not being actively maintained. I also saw a few others but they are either unmaintained of don't really reach the functionality of these two.
The kind of project I was working on for past year did not require tagging like functionality therefore I am out of touch in this area.
So before starting on writing my own app I thought, I would ask the mighty Stackoverflow community if there are any maintained forks of these apps or if there others similar to them.
Thanks in advance.
I've used both on different projects, too with different Django versions. There are some forks to. For instance, for django-tagging there is django-tagging-ng that provides multilingual, synonyms and hierarchy.
I would simply refer to opencomparison for package comparisons of django apps here - http://django.opencomparison.org/grids/g/tagging/
And I would go with django-tagging and add in django-tagging-ext optionally.
Is this what you are looking for?
https://github.com/bkjones/django-taxonomy
I want to create a pretty simple site with a few pages using Django. I guess I could use Wordpress. But there is some custom stuff (like a special kind of calendar app) that I rather do in Python than PHP.
I came across simple-pages which seems like a nice middle way between flat-pages and a fullblown Django CMS (which just seems overkill). It can automatically generate menus. But it seems like it hasn't been updated in a long time. Is it deprecated or is it stable? Or do flat-pages have the same functionality these days?
Honestly, It would be super easy to build your own small custom CMS since you know python. It would only take a few models and not a lot of time - the result being something better customized for your needs.
I've used some of these examples before - and they work ok, but I always find myself having to add something more.
One idea is to check out what sub-applications some of these things are using - maybe import only what you really need.
But I almost always find myself spending a LITTLE extra time to build out my own schema/structure for simple pages Then using a nice admin skin like grappelli when handing it over to clients (you get SORT of that wordpress feel (sort of))
Lots of admin customization that can make it easy for clients (and You) to work with static pages.
Closed. This question is opinion-based. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by editing this post.
Closed 6 years ago.
Improve this question
At the moment we are running few smaller PHP sites (small company, private, non-profit org, friends...) and would like to migrate them to Python in order to be able to tweak them more easily and/or extend their functionality due to being familiar with Python although without real experience using some of the Python frameworks.
In order not to write everything from the scratch, we'd need decent CMS, blog and some e-commerce module.
We did some research, installed and tried few apps in Django world and so far have arrived to the two possibilities:
Django-CMS as CMS, Zinnia as blog engine and Django shop as e-commerce or
Mezzanine which integrates CMS+blog and Cartridge as shopping cart application.
Both combinations are nice, although not perfect...At the moment there is problem integrating released versions of django-cms & zinnia due to their usage of non-compatible versions of django-mptt or e.g. Mezzanine is missing some features like linkback support in blog etc.
While playing with the above two sets of apps, we heard about Web2py and must say that we like lot of things there...
We are aware it's younger project with smaller community, less apps etc., but wonder if there is some set of web2py applications which can compare with the two above-mentioned Django sets so that we can choose to start with Web2py, learn it and in that process replace PHP sites with it?
So, we would like to have some capable CMS+blog with the following features:
tag cloud, categories
spam protection
RSS feeds
multiple authors
threaded comments (optional)
linkback (pingback/trackback) support
(easily) theme-able
markdown/reST markup for writing content/posting
multi-lingual support
As far as e-commerce is concerned, besides easy integration with CMS+blog apps we do not need anything spectacular - our 'company' is selling 'services', so no need for thousands of products (only 10s of them), no complicated shipping options so something like:
multi-lingual support
basic infrastructure for payment methods (e.g.) PayPal and we would need to write a custom module for form-based API
simple shopping cart able to handle simple product descriptions
tax calculations and
(optional) PDF support
would be everything what we would need.
Considering the features we would like to have, our (non)experience working with any framework, which one - Django or Web2py - you consider is more suitable in terms of ease of learning, ease of use, application support etc. ?
I've sent two posts to web2py list and (maybe) because my query was not specific-enough (or some other reason) I did not receive any reply there and I saw there are some apps like KPAX CMS which looks old/non-maintained. Otoh, there is Powerpack which incorporates Instant Press but I'm not sure about availability of e-commerce component. Finally, I've found out about plugin_wiki which seems to be new/young app, but, considering we found* out about possibilities in Django-world, we would like to learn about the situation on the Web2py scene in order to be able to evaluate both options better.
p.s. it would be nice if Appliances list would be organized a bit better so that it's easy to find out what is maintained, where is project page etc.
I've had a lot of success with Django-CMS. It's very, very easy to write custom content-type plugins, extend menu nodes with custom nav elements, such as a list of product categories, etc. It's dead-simple to hook custom application code to any page in the navigation hierarchy.
As you mentioned in your question, Zinnia also plugs into Django-CMS for a nice blogging solution that is also extensible. Adding a cart app, whether it's from the DIVIO team or not should be an easy task.
Django, DjangoCMS and Python in general, have very low learning curves in my opinion. In 14 years of development, Django is the only web framework that hasn't gotten in my way, and Python is an absolute pleasure to work with on a daily basis.
I think you'll find that the Django ecosystem is much more holistic than any of the other Python frameworks, it's also very, very well documented and there are literally hundreds of 3rd party apps. Plus, Django admin can potentially save you many weeks of dev time, and you can override, skin and extend it to do just about anything.
My $0.02 :)
-- EDIT --+
Yeah, right after I posted I realized I was heavy on comparison of frameworks but light on suggested solutions to your problem (i.e. existing appliances). I think that Django probably has more matured addins/apps. That being said, crafting your own blog in web2py (a simple blog) is probably only a little harder than configuring one for another framework.
There is the wordpressclone appliance: http://web2py.com/appliances/default/show/36
(you can extract existing wordpress data and get it in here, i'm pretty sure there's a WP export and an import function on this appliance)
There is an e-store (haven't used it): http://web2py.com/appliances/default/show/24
There is KPax CMS, as you said, but i think this one might be out of date, unless it was updated recently. The integration between these should be possible, you can share sessions across apps and I think if you have the same auth_user db, it should work.
I would try installing these and see if they are close to meeting your needs -- especially KPax since I'm not sure the state it's in.
-- END EDIT --
Both Django and Web2py are very good frameworks in my opinion. I think you would be happy with either. That being said, having not used frameworks I would say to with web2py, unless you NEED certain modules that only exist in the django world. Web2py probably has a little more gradual learning curve. Also, it can do RSS out of the box, there's a screencast somewhere showing how to create a blog app in about 5 minutes (including comments), and the community is (usually) very responsive. I don't think there is anything that web2py can do that django can't (except DB migrations -- but i think you can make django do them with some 3rd party code), or vice versa.
Django favors a "explicit is better than implicit" development methodology, which requires to you import various modules and doesn't have all the "magic" of web2py. Using django, you will be more aware of exactly what is going on under the hood. The django templating language is easy to learn and provides a lot of functionality for common markup tasks. Their is a LOT of documentation, a larger user-base and tons of 3rd party modules/plugins/whatever.
Web2py favors a "everything should have a default" approach, and enables to to focus on the big picture without getting bogged down by the minutia of web development. I'm not saying this is in contrast to django, but rather that web2py is very strong on this point. It allows you to rapidly develop applications, and takes the headache out of things like updating a table schema (i.e. it does database migrations). I also prefer web2py's templating language to django's, as it allows pure python and does not require one to learn a separate templating language at all.
I think both frameworks have decent internationalization/localization features. I'm not sure if Django's is still under development or not? Web2py's is easy to use, but I think you might have to provide a lot of the translations yourself.
As for the lack of replies on the web2py list, maybe it's because this topic is becoming more and more frequent? I'm not sure. You could ask people on the web2py freenode channel.
Also, definitely check out this link:
Django vs web2py for a beginner developer
The first response is from the lead developer of web2py, but I think he makes a fairly balanced comparison.
Also, the previous thread includes a link to here (the good and bad of web2py):
http://www.mengu.net/post/django-vs-web2py
web2py is a great framework, but currently light on reusable CMS, blog, and particularly e-commerce applications. It sounds like you have already stumbled upon the main options -- plugin_wiki, Powerpack, and Instant Press.
I don't think there is a mature and currently maintained e-commerce application, but you may be able to make use of web2py-estore. There are also some options for accepting credit card payments (see also).
plugin_wiki includes comment functionality, and there is also plugin_comments. For PDFs, pyfpdf comes with web2py, and there is also web2py_appreport. web2py also includes RSS support.
EDIT: Also, another web2py CMS under development, to be released soon: SimplrCMS
What is a good django open source app that I can learn from? Something that follows best practices, and covers the majority of features and isn't overly complicated?
This would depend on your current level of knowledge of python and django.
If you are just starting to use django, I suggest you take a look in django documentation. It is well specified and clear. If you have some project in mind, start working on it while looking up for best practices about specific parts. For python coding style try to follow the pep 8 style guide.
If you already have done some work with django there are many sites lie these:
http://djangopackages.com/categories/apps/
http://www.django-apps.com/
What I do nowdays is look into django contrib apps (admin, auth, comments, flatpages), which are built based on the rest of django. This gives the best ways on how to write my apps.
Following the django comments framework (object independent), I am working on an app django-valuate (object independent attachment of ratings, likebuttons etc. through template tags)
These are some of my views. I have also starred this question, as I would like to know about some different perspectives and if mine are sound.
I've found djangobb (www.djangobb.org) to be a complete application, production quality and relatively simple. I use it as a base for my application which has nothing to do with forums and bb.
cloc output: only 3000 lines of python code in 30 files, another 2900 lines of templates html
I do not think there would be any one specific app that would cover all/most features of Django since the concept of the Django app itself is to perform specific/related functionality.
Having said that, a popular Django app is django-registration. Its popularity stems from the obvious requirement of most webapps to have User authentication and also its extremely easy to integrate with a Django project.
The best approach perhaps would be to keep trying the tons of open source Django apps available on the net. You can browse through http://www.djangopackages.com/ and http://www.django-apps.com/ to start getting your hands dirty.
snipt.net, a code sharing site:
https://github.com/lionburger/snipt
Review Board, a code review web app
https://github.com/reviewboard/reviewboard/tree/master/reviewboard
rietveld, another code review on app engine, by GVR himself. You need to know a bit of Django before digging into this source code since the Django models don't work on App Engine, GAE db model is used instead.
http://code.google.com/p/rietveld/source/browse/#svn%2Ftrunk
Does anyone here use django-grappelli here ?
I would like to read some experience of developers or users, if there are common mistake to avoid or why you use or do not use grappelli.
Thanks for sharing
I'm using grappelli as well. I'd be content with django's normal admin, but if you need to present the backend to someone else grappelli is much more appealing.
The current grappelli version 2.1 is working quite good with django 1.2. The only problems you(sometimes) run into is that 3rd party apps have sometimes some problems, which you can solve in most cases quite easily with changing the custom templates they are coming with (in most cases it's just other names for css classes etc, sometimes there are some js incompatibilities as well, which you can solve easily!
The actual version of grappelli also has a nicer html/css framework which enables you to easily use their styles/ui elements in your own templates. Have a look at http://grappelliproject.com/ for that (it's not totally valid for the actual version but gives you a small impression on what to expect!)
According to the developers, grappelli should soon work together with the marvellous django-admin-tools,which offer you drop down menus within the admin and a customizable index dashboard! Installation is not quite complicated, just do not forget to pass the adminmedia folder to manage.py! All in all I think it's quite recommendable (also check out django-filebrowser and medman if you dont know them yet, which come from the same developers and work very well together with grappelli)!
I have used Grappelli several places and suggest using it, if you are using admin for anything more than a "database debugging" purpose.
From django 1.1.1 onwards, you can create multiple instances of admin, so generally, I keep the main admin to examine the data as it is, and another instance of it for using purpose, with grappelli.
A minor issue is that,
On the dev server, it is hard to ask django to use a different admin media folder, and the easiest way is to use the command line parameter, as it is documented.
I started using django-grappelli recently and will like to point out 2 cases that newbies like me have a high chance of wasting time on:
For Django==1.6, use grappelli==2.5 and not the current latest 2.6. Also for Django==1.5/1.4 use grappelli==2.4.The official docs clearly mention it but many may overlook it and later wonder why it is not working.
In INSTALLED_APPS setting, if grappelli is not placed above django default apps it will not work. I used to think that order is not of importance for INSTALLED_APPS but this made me change my mind.