History and goal

Developers spends a lot of time just doing cruds, Django built-in admin was pretty and really nice… years ago. Right now customers (and people in general) are more used to the web and they want to change whatever on their smartphones, upload images cropping the important part, they’re used to select2 (or similar) in selects with so many options, etc..

A friend of mine told me to try backpack for laravel (https://backpackforlaravel.com/), well in fact he showed me a demo. I was impressed with what he could do just configuring a bit the models and the forms:

• Responsive design, more or less I guess you could use django-flat-responsive for that

• Tabbed forms: really easy to place fields in tabs, imho much more useful for the end user if the form is complex and has many fields (I’ve found nothing similar for django’s admin)

• Wrappable fields: You can define the wrapper of the label+input (col-6, col-12), so it’s easy to place fields side-by-side or 3 in a row, etc… You can do the same with django-crispy-forms but I’ve seen no easy way to integrate it on django’s admin. Note from @spookylukey: There is a really easy way to put the fields side-by-side in the django’s contrib admin.

• Select2 for selects with fk, etc… I’ve tried django-select2 + django-easy-select2 with not too much luck (I’m sure it was my fault), didn’t know django-autocomplete-light tbh.

• Lots of widgets depending on the type of field (44+ field types: date, time, datetime, toggle, video…).

• Lots of columns - the field representation in a listing table - (images, data with/without link, buttons, extra buttons…).

• Reordering - nested sortable - (something similar to django-mptt)…

After seeing all that stuff I felt a bit shocked, started to look for something similar for django (for the built-in admin or some other piece of code that gives me something closer). I’ve tried django-material, django-jet, grappelli, django-adminlte2, djadmin, django-flat-responsive… but in the end I felt that only a cocktail with some of them could do the job. I did a list of soft and features (similar to the above’s one) and, in the end, I’ve started to think that if I had that need, why not to make it public and test if the community feels same “lacks” than me?. That’s the story behind this project.

Crazy? yep, I felt myself really weird after read Jacob’s post (https://jacobian.org/writing/so-you-want-a-new-admin/) but I needed to make the project public.

Features

• Responsive design: django-adminlte2

• Tabbed forms: django-crispy-forms

• Wrappable fields: django-crispy-forms

• Image cropping: django-image-cropping (custom widget)

• something for select2 (custom widget)

• something for other file types (upload, multiple upload, date, time, color etc…) (custom widgets)

• Reordering: django-mptt

• Easy to understand/adapt: A cruds mixin with CBV was a good idea, I’ve found https://github.com/bmihelac/django-cruds and it rang the definitely bell here

• Easy to extend (anyone could contribute with new widgets or behaviors, inlines, search, filters…)

Online Resources

• Code repository

• Documentation

• Pypi

• DjangoPackages

• For reporting a bug use GitHub Issues

Screenshots