Django MVP

Get your Django project to a minimum viable product — fast. django-mvp gives you a polished, settings-configurable application layout (DaisyUI 5 + Tailwind CSS v4), a library of reusable django-cotton UI components, and enhanced class-based views with search, ordering and pagination out of the box. Things should just work.

Note: django-mvp is in active development (0.x). Import paths and component APIs may change between minor versions — see the CHANGELOG.

What you get

• A complete app shell — sidebar, navbar, content area, footer, and mobile dock navigation, rendered around every page and configured from Django settings (pydata-sphinx-theme style): sidebar collapse breakpoint, offcanvas vs. icon-rail collapse, and navbar widgets are all MVP_CONFIG keys.
• A Cotton component library — cards, buttons, grids, menus, dropdowns, pagination, hero sections and more, with small consistent attribute APIs. Need more control? Override the component's template in your project — that's the intended extension path, not a bigger API.
• Views that do the boring parts — list pages with admin-style search, whitelisted ordering and pagination; form pages with automatic crispy-forms detection; delete flows with related-object summaries and type-to-confirm; styled error pages.
• Menus in Python — sidebar and mobile-dock navigation via django-flex-menus, with active states, icons and badges handled for you.
• Icons by name — every icon resolves through django-easy-icons; swap the icon set from settings without touching templates.
• No build tooling required — a prebuilt stylesheet ships with the package. When your own templates need their own Tailwind classes, one management command generates the build config.

Quick start

pip install django-mvp

# settings.py
INSTALLED_APPS = [
    ...
    "django.contrib.sites",
    "django_cotton",
    "easy_icons",
    "flex_menu",
    "mvp",
]

TEMPLATES = [{
    ...
    "OPTIONS": {"context_processors": [
        ...
        "mvp.context_processors.mvp_config",
    ]},
}]

EASY_ICONS = {
    "default": {
        "renderer": "easy_icons.renderers.ProviderRenderer",
        "config": {"tag": "i"},
        "packs": ["mvp.utils.BS5_ICONS"],   # icons used by mvp's own components
    },
}

FLEX_MENUS = {
    "renderers": {
        "sidebar": "mvp.renderers.SidebarRenderer",
        "dock": "mvp.renderers.MobileFooterNavRenderer",
    },
}

{# templates/dashboard.html #}
{% extends "mvp/base.html" %}

{% block content %}
  <c-container>
    <c-section title="Dashboard" icon="home">
      <c-grid md="2" xl="4">
        <c-card title="Orders">150 new</c-card>
        <c-card title="Revenue">$12,400</c-card>
      </c-grid>
    </c-section>
  </c-container>
{% endblock %}

Full walkthrough: Getting Started.

Configure the layout from settings

MVP_CONFIG = {
    "layout": {
        "sidebar": {
            "breakpoint": "lg",       # sm|md|lg|xl|2xl — when the sidebar is persistent
            "collapse": "offcanvas",  # "offcanvas" (slide away) or "icons" (icon rail)
        },
        "navbar": {
            # Cotton component names, rendered at the right end of the navbar
            "end": ["actions.theme-controller", "actions.language-switcher"],
        },
    },
}

Per-page overrides use component attributes (<c-app breakpoint="xl">, <c-app.sidebar collapse="icons">). Details: Layout.

Views in one line each

from mvp.views import MVPListView, MVPCreateView, MVPUpdateView, MVPDeleteView


class ProductListView(MVPListView):
    model = Product
    search_fields = ["name", "description"]              # ?q= multi-word search
    order_by = [("name_asc", "Name (A-Z)", "name")]      # ?o= whitelisted ordering


class ProductCreateView(MVPCreateView):
    model = Product
    fields = ["name", "category", "price"]               # crispy-detected rendering

Details: Views.

Menus in Python

# myapp/menus.py
from flex_menu import MenuItem
from mvp.menus import AppMenu

AppMenu.extend([
    MenuItem(name="dashboard", view_name="dashboard",
             extra_context={"label": "Dashboard", "icon": "home"}),
])

Details: Navigation.

Optional integrations

Views that build on third-party packages live in guarded modules — no extras, and the dependency is only required when you import the integration:

from mvp.integrations.django_tables.views import MVPTableView      # django-tables2
from mvp.integrations.django_filters.views import MVPFilteredListView  # django-filter

Details: Integrations.

Styling & Theming

Django MVP is styled with Tailwind CSS v4 + DaisyUI 5 and ships a prebuilt stylesheet — most projects need no build tooling. Use the packaged components (and DaisyUI themes for colors) and you're done.

Need a DaisyUI component the packaged CSS doesn't include (e.g. progress, skeleton)? Every DaisyUI component is also published as a standalone CSS file — add a <link> for it in a styles block override (CDN or self-hosted) and it picks up your theme automatically. Still no build tooling. See docs/styling.md.

If your own templates use their own Tailwind utility classes, rebuild the CSS with the generated entry file, which scans your templates and Django MVP's:

npm install -D tailwindcss @tailwindcss/cli daisyui
python manage.py mvp_tailwind > assets/tailwind.css
npx @tailwindcss/cli -i assets/tailwind.css -o static/css/app.css --minify

See docs/styling.md for the full guide (two-tier model, theming, and the packaged Tailwind preset).

Documentation

Start at docs/index.md: Getting Started · Layout · Components · Navigation · Views · Styling · Integrations.

Requirements

• Python 3.12+
• Django 5.2+ (currently supported Django releases)
• django-cotton, django-flex-menus, django-easy-icons (installed automatically)

Design philosophy

1. Things should just work — sensible defaults, minimum ceremony, MVP first.
2. Configuration-driven — layout and behavior controlled via settings.MVP_CONFIG.
3. Basic components, not a component framework — small attribute APIs; extensive customization happens by overriding templates.
4. Focused integrations — only for packages the author reuses across projects; the guarded-module pattern makes rolling your own trivial.

Use cases

Admin dashboards, data-management tools, research portals, internal apps, SaaS back-offices — anywhere you want a production-looking, data-centric Django app without building the UI layer first.

Contributing

Contributions welcome! When adding components: use <c-vars /> for defaults, no ghost attributes, include ARIA attributes, and add tests (tests/test_components/ renders every packaged component). Rebuild the stylesheet with invoke build-stylesheet when templates change classes — CI fails on drift.

License

MIT License — see LICENSE.

Acknowledgments

Built with django-cotton by @wrabit, DaisyUI, Tailwind CSS, Alpine.js and Bootstrap Icons.