I am trying to create a portal.
The portal should allow multiple user logins. The users are customers and upon login they should be able to check their sales, repository and stuff like that. Users won't need to be post blog, or anything like that, just simple checking of their daily sales.
As the admin, i, of course, should be able to edit all accounts.
I am contemplating to use a CMS such as Drupal, unless there is no such solutions, maybe a framework such as RoR would work too.
My question is, which open source CMS/framework should I use?
I would recommend you try Drupal because you can create your sales and repository info as "content". If it's suitable it would be much more productive and less error-prone than coding up something from scratch.
A common misconception of Drupal is that it is only suited for editorial written content like blog posts or articles. By using CCK and views you can quickly set up some CRUD functionality and more.
Here's a nice intro to CCK.
That sounds like pretty standard requirements for a extranet site, django or RoR seem a obvious choice. CMS's like Drupal, django-cms, Plone etc. are more concerned with content such as texts.
Choose your tool according to your current skills. I myself prefer django, but RoR will be better if you already know ruby.
CMS won't suit you because they are basically designed for managing content. Your requirements seem to far simple from that. If you are familiar with python, you can do such a site in 20 mins using Django.
I have no experience with Ruby of RoR!
Related
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!
It's been a while since I last used Django for a project and there have been some really great advances in the core project and the ecosystem around it.
One of those is the mature API development libraries like django-rest-framework.
So far I'm loving it. But it seems that all the guides I've found are disabling the Django Admin when using Django Rest Framework.
The reasons I've seen given were essentially "We don't need it for anything" or "We aren't using sessions, which Admin uses, so it won't work, so we're not using it."
"Don't need it" is a valid reason.
But other than that, are there reasons that it's bad practice to keep the Django Admin enabled when the project is primarily used as an API?
For my purposes, I find it convenient to manage user permissions and as a simple way to code admin only functions for dealing with the underlying data.
note: I've considered whether this question is designed to elicit opinions, which is not appropriate on SO. I believe that the answers I'm asking for will be technical or security based reasons with fact or experience based reasoning.
Totally agree.
On my current project, users are getting and setting ALL data via django-rest-framework.
Like you, I find the admin site convenient to manage user permissions, permissions groups, writing emails, sms, mobile applications push and more.
More, all these models are being translated, and translation is set in THE ADMIN SITE !!!
So, if we need a new object with translation, we do not need a new app release (example in pic of a question).
objects translations are readable and clear.
Data is organized nicely with minimal effort.
Admin get cool skins (jet / grappelli etc etc)
Language activation works like a charm in the APIViews.
I'm developing a web application. It's months away from completion but I would like to build a landing page to show to potential customers to explain things and gauge their interest--basically collecting their email address and if they feel like it additional information like names + addresses.
Because I'm already using Django to build my site I thought I might use another Django App to serve as this landing page. The features I need are
to display a fairly static page and potentially a series of pages,
collect emails (and additional customer data)
track their actions--e.g., they got through the first two pages but didnt fill out the final page.
Is there any pre-existing Django app that provides any of these features?
If there is not a Django app, then does anyone know of another, faster/better way than building my own app? Perhaps a pre-existing web service that you can skin and make look like your own? Maybe there's the perfect system but it's PHP?--I'm open for whatever.
Option 1: Google Sites
You can set it up very very quickly. Though your monitoring wouldn't be as detailed as you're asking for.. Still, easy and fasssst!
Option 2: bbclone
Something else that may be helpful is to set up some PHP based site (wordpress or something) and use bbclone for tracking stuff on it. I've found bbclone to be pretty intense with the reporting what everyone does - though it's been a while since I used it.
Option 3: Django Flatpages
The flatpages Django contrib app is pretty handy for making static flat pages. I'd probably just embed a Google Docs Form to collect email addresses (as that's super fast and lets you get back to real work). But this suggestion would still leave you needing to figure out how to get the level of detail you want on the stats end.
Perhaps consider Google Analytics anyway?
Regardless, I suggest you use Google Analytics with everything. That'll work with anything you do really, and for all I know, perhaps you can find a way to get the stats you're really looking for out of it.
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.