Question

i’ve been reading about this in the docs but couldn’t find anything.

Do you recommend to extend custom forms in Django?

Here’s my problem. I’m using Biblion to write a blog application. The thing is that i don’t want to use the default behavior (create blog posts from the admin site). There’s this form: https://github.com/eldarion/biblion/blob/master/biblion/forms.py#L13 that has custom logic to save the Post (and make some parsing).

I’d love to extend this form for some custom actions. For example, i’d like to make some users create blog Posts, but don’t allow them to make published. Instead I should check and moderate them. So, for that sake i’m trying with something like:

class PostForm(AdminPostForm):
    publish = forms.BooleanField(
        required = False,
        widget = forms.HiddenInput # don't show it
    )

It’s working now, but i wanted to ask you guys if there’s some other option (i could prevent it to be shown in my template, iterating over the form fileds, but don’t like this option very much).

Other option is to just copy/paste the code from AdminPostForm, but, doesn’t seem like a good option neither. But if there’s no simple way to customize the form for several cases, i’ll just do that.

Ideas?

Thanks!!

Answer 1

Extending ModelAdmin

If you want to implement a per-user logic in your forms you might want to extend your ModelAdmin instead of the form.

Here, you’d want to override the ModelAdmin‘s save_form method.
save_form takes 3 arguments in addtion to self: request, form, change. You would be doing the following:

def save_form(self, request, form, change):
    instance = super(MyModelAdmin, self).save_form(request, form, change)
    if instance.published and not user.has_perm('mark_published'):
        instance.published = False #You could be displaying a message here.
    return instance

Usually, Django classes have a lot of hooks so you can plug your custom logic just there.

Why should you be doing this?

Here, you’re just hiding the input, but anyone with a decent browser would be able to modify this value and post True in your published input.