Mastering Django: Core

When and why to use the admin interface-and when not to

After having worked through this chapter, you should have a good idea of how to use Django's admin site. But I want to make a point of covering when and why you might want to use it-and when not to use it.

Django's admin site especially shines when nontechnical users need to be able to enter data; that's the purpose behind the feature, after all. At the newspaper where Django was first developed, development of a typical online feature-say, a special report on water quality in the municipal supply-would go something like this:

• The reporter responsible for the project meets with one of the developers and describes the available data.
• The developer designs Django models to fit this data and then ...