[snide]

I'm sort of fascinated by the resilience of the Django admin. It's nearly 20 years old at this point and really hasn't changed too much since I first used it in 2007. I've always thought it was a good example of what having a strong designer early in your project life-cycle can do.

[pedrovhb]

Yup. No project of this size is without some ugliness, but Django really is an impressive piece of technology and complex but cohesive architecture. The more I understood its layers the more I appreciated how much it does, and how well it allows you not to worry about things until you need them.

You mentioned having a strong designer early in the project; did you have a specific name in mind? I'd love to see what they're up to and study some of their other projects.

[dsissitka]

I'm guessing Wilson Miner:

https://wilsonminer.com

[snide]

Yes. I was referencing Wilson. Thanks!

[quickthrower2]

I am strongly considering django for the next side project. I am new to python but enjoy it’s low ceremony approach (you sort of forget what language you are using, it gets out of the way) and then django to have more bases covered including this admin. Then htmx to avoid JS, maybe Elm if it needs interactivity

[leetrout]

Strong opinion: DO NOT break up your project into apps.

Make 1 app called core or common of whatever and replace models.py with models/<namespace_or_domain>.py and import those into models/__init__.py

Everyone jumps into apps with foreign keys across app boundaries and it makes a mess of things from the start that doesnt buy you anything.

1 app. 1 set of migrations. Turn models, views, etc into a package instead of the single file module.

Its the one thing I wish the docs would prescribe and demonstrate for new project advice. .

[jstarfish]

> Make 1 app called core or common

Do not call it core. There's an existing app or module or something with that name and this will introduce hard-to-diagnose bugs. Common is preferable.

[jareklupinski]

i've been getting away with calling the folder with models/views 'app' and the folder with asgi/wsgi/settings 'config' (top-folder name is the project name)

so far nothing bit me other than an awkward 'app' in my installed_apps, fingers crossed

[leetrout]

Thats a strawman. Many libs use common as well.

[pdmccormick]

After many years, I’ve come to the same conclusions and can heartily recommend these suggestions!

Another similar suggestion I’d add is make a settings module with a base collection of configuration (i.e. myproject/settings/common.py) that other deployment-specific dev.py & prod.py import from.

Basically, don’t forget that Django projects are always Python modules too, so go ahead and use those language features too.

[appliku]

After many years of experiments i came to the same exact conclusion.

In 15 years I haven't seen a single case when splitting a project into multiple apps brought anything but pain.

Also, splitting files like models into packages is also a great approach. 6 months ago I found myself with models.py, API.py (my alternative for API views vs regular views) and serializes.py each over 3k lines of code. Spent 3 days splitting them into small files by topic. Way easier to work.

I also wish docs suggested that it is an option and better to split them earlier. Because it is so easy to just "add one more model to the end of the file, what can go wrong?"

You understand what goes wrong after 2-3k LoC

[stavros]

Agreed. Only make another app if it's almost entirely decoupled from the main app, e.g. a blog app or similar.

[zakki]

Do you have a tutorial for more detailed example of what you wrote?

[matthiaswh]

This tutorial addresses the practice: https://doordash.engineering/2017/05/15/tips-for-building-hi...

There's also a long, uh, spirited discussion about it here with some decent arguments going both directions: https://forum.djangoproject.com/t/why-do-we-need-apps/827/19

[synergy20]

if not, please write one when you have time, short one is better than none :)

[fernandotakai]

so, my 2 cents (and it's something i've said before here):

every time i start a project with something other than django, i end up with django, but "homebrewed".

example: you start with flask. you need auth, so you add flask-login.

you need some database access, so you add SQLAlchemy (and its flask plugin). you also need some kind of admin page, so you add flask-admin.

when you are finished, you have a flask-django framework, but not as well integrated -- with django, you get ALL of those all of those out-of-the-box, everything is well oiled and well integrated.

so, yeah, imho django is an amazing backend framework that does its job perfectly, specially when you add some really good libraries (like django-rest-framework).

[lazypenguin]

Same, I do a lot of starlette/sqlqlchemy/etc. and I often miss Django and it’s batteries included approach. Django has its warts but my god is it productive.

[bboygravity]

Every time I read a new comment about webapp stuff, new languages and "technologies" seem to be mentioned.

How does anybody keep up with this stuff, let alone create it all? :p

[quickthrower2]

Lol yes this is what I am trying to run away from ironically! Forget Elm and HTMX for a second: I would like to use Django because it should be boring tech to get the job done. HTMX allows you to have interaction without JS using HTML-like primitives. I would just learn what I need. Elm is something I used before but not really needed! More of an indulgence. Vanilla JS will do though. No need for Elm or React for side projects.

I am trying to avoid the nextjs/react/ etc stuff where I spend half my time on tooling issues. JS itself is nightmarish (people complain about python dependencies but I haven’t yet seen a big issue yet) but node JS weird module errors and myriad places things are configured and that you usually have build steps etc. Makes me want to get away from that.

You don’t need to “keep up”. You don’t need to know all 100 ways to make a sausage. Just make sausages. Occasionally tweak the machine.