How would you update a django app when there was an order in drupal ubercart. The order details and user information gets carried to django app.
We would need to know a lot more specifics about your setup in order to really answer this question, but it sounds like at a basic level all you need to do is use Drupal to modify another database (i.e., the one Django's using) and possibly redirect to the Django app?
If that's the case, then you'll need to write a small custom module that would:
Switch the active database to the one Django is using (this is relatively easy using db_set_active())
Make your updates (can't help much here without knowing what your updates actually are, but either way, it will probably involve raw SQL)
Possibly redirect to a page in your Django app (depending on if the redirect is needed or if the user can stay within Drupal)
Does that answer your question?
Related
I'm relatively new to Django and especially new to the admin functionality. I've read many articles expounding the benefits of the built-in admin site but I'm not sure to what extent they should be used.
Some general questions:
What sort of database interactions should be in admin and which should be part of the general site functionality?
I understand that models can be easily changed/deleted on the admin site but is it the best way to add new objects rather than in a custom page?
A more specific question:
I'm creating a website for tracking packages. The idea is that staff would scan and insert many (hundreds of) packages into the database on a daily basis. I'm unsure whether this could be done efficiently in admin as the current process of adding a model is a slow, multi-step process (I don't know to what extent that can be customized). As this is one of the site's main functionalities it also seems odd that it would reside in the admin site. Would it make more sense in the Django framework to write my own page? Or would I just be rewriting (probably less efficiently) what's already been created with django-admin?
Any suggestions or Django standards you guys have would be greatly appreciated.
Generally the django-admin should be used for CRUD (Create, Read, Update and Delete) operations. It should be used where you want to quickly setup a facility to allow people to manage the data. It can handle complex database relationships and inline editing, however it would be more appropriate to build a seperate django application if your adminstration facility is going to be bespoke. Django-admin can be customised heavily and you can subclass its inner workings, however it's a lot easier in the long run to code and maintain your own application albeit it will take longer to get it up and running.
One way of finding out if the django-admin is appropriate to use or not is to pick one important requirement and try to implement it, if it feels like it's a lot of work trying to implement it in django-admin then it's probably a case of shoehorning. I think sometimes requirements are shoehorned into django-admin by developers who think it's a one-size-fits-all solution which it simply isn't.
I would like to have one users system (preferrably Django's) to rule both Django and Wordpress.
The use case is that Django is an application embedded inside a wordpress installation (via iframe or something similar). In order to use the Django, users must be authenticated, authentication in WordPress is not mandatory, but recommended (for posting comments and stuff like that).
In order to ease the usage of the site, I would like the same sign-up to apply for both the Django app and the WordPress installation. Sign-up might occur either via OAuth / FB authentication (lots of Django solutions for this), or via dedicated site users. While the signup process is most important, it would be nice if certain user fields would remain synced between the two worlds.
My thoughts on the matter:
Maybe there's an out-of-the-box solution (couldn't find any)
Create a full-fledged django app for syncing the two user models (wp_users and django's users) via one of the following options:
A master(django)-slave(wp) solution, where each change in Django changes info in the wp_users and other related tables and vice-versa (via Django periodically checking the DB or creating a WP plugin). Can be implemented either by putting both django and wp on the same (MySQL) db, using XML-RPC or some other anomination I didn't think of.
Same as above, but let WP be the master instead of Django (seems harder).
An external system to rule both models - maybe make OAuth / some other external authentication mandatory, and somehow sync the two models using this?
Has anyone encountered this situation before?
Any suggestions will be appreciated.
You should really try to work out some approach, revising your work when encountering problems afterwards.
Nevertheless imo Wordpress is kind of bordered. I wouldn't recommend making changes to both frameworks, but fixate on Django.
For example you could create a WordpressUser(User) and create a python script a crobjob, celery task or whatever you'll need to syncronize your databases. Meaning to say you should keep things strictly separated unless you have very good reasons not to (I can't think of any).
I've just been approached by my boss about the possibility of white labeling our Django-based site for a new, large customer. Basically, it sounds like it would mainly be changing the graphics/logos on the site. But, I'm sure that at some point they will want to start tweaking the business logic as well. I'm still unclear whether the desire is for it to be a subdomain (e.g. customer.mydomain.com) or a completely new custom domain. Ultimately, it will need to share the database with the rest of the system (for multiple reasons). Is this a good use of the Sites Framework in Django? Or is there a better way of doing this?
More info: Django 1.3.1; PostgreSQL 9.1; Hosted on Heroku
Use a combination of middleware (to set the active site) and context processors (to act on that). You could try to hook into contrib's site framework, but I've always outgrown it rather quickly.
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 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.