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shezi / django-unstuck

Suggestions for overcoming common challenges in Django projects
BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" License
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Proposal: When do you need to move from built in admin site to a custom one #2

Open madalinpopa opened 1 year ago

madalinpopa commented 1 year ago

Maybe is not clear for everyone this aspect, and I saw a lot of threads with debates around this topic regarding the django admin site.

  1. I know that django admin site is one of the best thing that you can have when you start a new project and you just want a quick way to manage data and test your models, but when do you decide that is time to build a custom admin site?
  2. Can Django admin site be customized thus you don't have to build a custom admin site?
shezi commented 1 year ago

This is a hard one: I've seen projects go with built-in admin for a long time, even with non-technical users, and with actual functionality tied into it.

For me the distinction is really between technical users and non-technical users. I see the Django Admin as a database interface for the technical users, and I tend to not customise it very much. It's for quickly getting off the ground and for fixing things that happen later on. But for non-technical users I found that they're often confused by the structure and vocabulary, which leans towards database-centric, instead of user-centric.

If there's content to be managed, I nowadays always recommend Wagtail and its admin. It's fantastic for non-technical users, even though it is not very easy to customize. If you need to go beyond that with non-technical staff, my recommendation is to custom-build an interface that orients its UX towards these users.

shezi commented 1 year ago

I'll tie this into an article soon.