Question

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?

Answer 1

‘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.