Question

I have this model:

class Category(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField()
    description = models.CharField(blank=True)
    parent = models.ForeignKey('self', blank=True, null=True)

I want Django to sort the categories with respect to their hierarchy, for example:

• Parent 1
  • Child 1
• Parent 2
  • Child 1

I did some research and found 2 apps, treebeard.al_tree and Django MPTT, both are powerful which may lead to lower performance or harder to maintain.

I will display the categories in website’s sidebar and inside admin pages (includes ForeignKey in posts model), there will be very low additions/modifications/deletions to categories, mostly reading only which should have no big affect on performance.

Is there any other app which offers this and simpler than those above?
Can I achieve this using Django without additional apps, using managers or something else?

Answer 1

I do not see any disadvantes using an app like django-mptt. In fact the methods provided by it are optimized to give you a maximum in performance when doing queries with hierarchical structures. No reason for me to worry about maintainability and/or performance and it is quite easy to use!