[rollcat]

Django Admin is a bit of a trap though ;) it's powerful enough that you can build an entire application with it, custom views and powerful filtering and ACLs and whatnot, it easily gets 80% of your job done with almost nothing but a declarative DSL.

But the remaining 20%? Now you've dug yourself a hole with no recourse but a complete rewrite. It's time/money you would've otherwise spent anyway, but that sunken cost fallacy hits hard.

[gnz11]

The Django docs do explicitly state that the admin is just meant for when you need a quick admin dashboard for internal applications. Anything outside of this domain or more complex, you should consider building your own.

[globular-toast]

Yep. Unfortunately the trap extends further than just the Django admin site itself. ModelForm and generic views are what power the admin site and they're exposed and you're encouraged to use them. Same with the low level crud permissions it creates. Once junior devs start doing the remaining 20% without rewriting you end up with something really difficult to maintain.

[rollcat]

It's not just the junior devs. A client once came to me with something that looked like 99.9% is just ModelForm, some CSS, and money. I should've taken 25% upfront and said no to the increasingly absurd change requests, but oh well.

[pkphilip]

Many frameworks have the "admin" sections with very similar drawbacks. It gets you 80% of the way there in 20% of the time, but the remaining 20% is very difficult to get done.

One framework which does not have this problem - or at least minimises the problem, is the Yii framework for PHP. A very nice and underrated framework

[andybak]

Oh, I've been disagreeing with this take on the admin for such a long time!