[ranger_danger]

My only criticism is that die-hard django devs constantly brush aside the admin and can't stop telling people not to use it. I think it's a huge mistake.

It's extremely well-designed and extensible, there is no reason to reinvent the wheel when so much time and effort has been put into it.

They will complain of things like "eventually you will have to start over with a custom solution anyway"... but whatever gripes they have, could just be put into improving the admin to make it better at whatever they're worried about.

Personally I've not run into something I couldn't make work in the admin without having to start over. My own usecases have been CRUD for backoffice users/management and I've had great success with that at several different companies over the last ~15 years.

People will say "it's only for admins you trust" yet it has very extensive permissions and form/model validation systems heavily used in the admin and elsewhere, and they are easily extensible.

[fhd2]

I use the heck out of the admin. I wouldn't say I'm super experienced with Django, but my solution to users being overwhelmed by doing things there is to build a bit of extra UI just for the stuff they need to do, more Rails style. Meaning: I don't go into fighting too much with the admin when what it can do out of the box is not feasible for some. But even if the admin ends up being used only by devs and some trained folks, I think it has amazing utility.

[andybak]

Absolutely!

I've been saying the same thing for decades (checks calendar - almost literally!)

[jdboyd]

The admin is at least 75% of why I choose Django over another framework.