Modifying the default Django admin site

Those of you following my posts, anybody?, know that I am experimenting with creating my own little CMS using Django. I am starting by following the Django tutorials. I got through the first 1 and 3/4 tutorials before needing to do some research into how to get my recursive relationship key working in the admin site. It turns out I was a little naive regarding how the model system works in Django. Anyway, I finally got this sorted out and now I am back to continuing with the last part of the second tutorial.

The initial aim of my app is to be able to create multiple menu structures. So far I have two models, a menu model:

class Menu(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    description = models.CharField(max_length=1000)
    in_use = models.BooleanField(default=True)

    def __unicode__(self):
        return self.title

    def is_in_use(self):
        return self.in_use == True

and a node model (which might turn into a “page” model in the future):

class Node(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    sort_order = models.IntegerField(default=1)
    menu = models.ForeignKey('Menu')
    parent = models.ForeignKey('self', blank=True, null=True)
    is_visible = models.BooleanField(default=True)

    def __unicode__(self):
        return self.title

This has given me the basic admin site that you get from using django.contrib.admin. Customising the admin site is also straightforward. By adding a few lines to the Menu class in my admin.py file I added filtering, searching and the ability to generate multiple nodes whilst adding a menu.

For filtering:

list_filter = ['in_use']

For searching:

search_fields = ['title']

And for multiple nodes I created this class:

class NodeInline(admin.TabularInline):
    model = Node
    extra = 5

And then appended this line to my MenuAmdin class:

inlines = [NodeInline]

Finally I also modified the data brought back in my list of menus:

list_display = ('title', 'in_use')

I also copied the base_site.html file into my own templates directory and modified it to display my own title in the admin system. I will be playing around with the ability to customise the backend more in the future as this is one the things I really like about Django. It’s so easy to modify the backend.

So far I have written maybe 50 lines of “code” (well really it’s more like templating instructions) and have a fully functioning admin site. This is great, but also a little worrying as I am sure I will hit a major road block in the future with my limited Python knowledge. Still, so far so good.