Question

I have some page elements that don’t change often and are displayed on every page like some adbars, footer content and such.

I want to change settings for this elements in my admin interface, so I have models for them.

Is there a best practice in django to deal with these elements?

Answer 1

Not really, no. You’re describing a singleton pattern, so you might want to implement a singleton model type:

class SingletonModel(models.Model):
    class Meta:
        abstract = True

    def save(self, *args, **kwargs):
        self.id = 1
        super(SingletonModel, self).save(*args, **kwargs)

    def delete(self, *args, **kwargs):
        pass

That will ensure that any model that inherits from that class can only ever have one member and that it can’t be deleted. Other than that, I would suggest combining everything into just one model called something like SiteSettings with fields for header, footer, etc, instead of separate model for each.