Question

I have a couple special use cases for Django admin, and I’m curious about other peoples’ opinions:

1. I’d like to use a customized version the admin to allow users to edit certain objects on the site (customized to look more like the rest of the site). At this point users can only edit objects they own, but I’ll eventually open this up to something more wiki-style where any user can edit any of the objects. In other words, I’d be designating all users as ‘staff’ and granting them permission to edit those objects.

2. I was considering also doing this for other objects where not all users would be able to edit all objects. I’d use a custom view to make sure users only edit their own objects. The benefits are that I would have a starting point for the editing interface (as the admin creates it automatically) that I could just customize with ModelAdmin since the admin functionality is already pretty close to what I’d like.

I feel like the first suggestion would be considered acceptable, while the second might not be. After checking out a few other resources (Valid use case for django admin? and the quote from the Django Book in that question) it seems like some Django developers feel like this is the wrong idea.

My question is: why? Are there any good reasons not to use customized admin views to grant per-object permissions from a performance, stability, security, usability, etc. standpoint? It seems to me like it could save a lot of time for certain applications (and I may end up doing it anyway) but I wanted to understand the reasons for making such a distinction between the admin and everything else.

Answer 1

You are free to do whatever you want. If you want to customize the Django admin, go for it, but you will likely not be as well supported by the mailing list and IRC once you deviate from the typical admin modifications path.

While customizing the admin might seem like the easy solution right now, more than likely it is going to be more work than just recreating the necessary forms yourself once you really try to tweak how things work. Look into the generic create/edit/delete and generic details/list views–they will expose the basic functionality you need very quickly, and are going to be easier to extend than the admin.

I believe the view that the “admin is not your app” comes from the fact that it is easier to use other mechanisms than hacking up the admin (plus, leaving the admin untouched makes forward compatibility much easier for the Django developers).