The Django admin is a CMS
The post Why is the Django Admin “Ugly”? and the discussion on Mastodon around it finally motivated me to write down my thoughts regarding the recurring theme in Django land that the Django administration interface isn’t a CMS (Content Management System).
I think that this is misguided and needlessly limits the discourse around what the admin’s current functionality is and the ideas what it could be and already is.
A web content management system is about website authoring for users who do not need to be web programming experts in their own rights. Django was created at the Lawrence Journal-World newspaper. The admin itself was created to allow quickly spinning up new websites, where the admin interface was used by content managers to fill in the content while programmers finalized the rest of the website. So obviously the admin interface was a system used to manage content1 from the beginning.
Sure, the Django admin site documentation states:
One of the most powerful parts of Django is the automatic admin interface. It reads metadata from your models to provide a quick, model-centric interface where trusted users can manage content on your site. The admin’s recommended use is limited to an organization’s internal management tool. It’s not intended for building your entire front end around. [emphasis added]
In other words, the Django documentation also points out that the admin is powerful and that it allows trusted users to manage content1.
Yes, it will be very painful if you try to do everything on top of the Django admin site. The warnings against using the Django admin for more than it was designed to are necessary and I totally support them. As soon as you’re getting into workflows, into complex permission scenarios (sad noises) or similar things the admin definitely isn’t for you. But, the admin nicely solves 90% of the problems with 10% of the effort. And it’s very good at that.
And sure, if you try building your own frontend on top of the Django admin you’re in for a bumpy ride, but that much should be obvious.
Many third party apps for Django actually target the Django admin interface itself, and not one of the (excellent!) Django-based CMS such as Wagtail. This means that by building on the Django admin instead of one of the CMS you’re running less code, by using more libraries instead of frameworks (on top of frameworks) you’re keeping maintenance lower, and you’re a part of a larger community2, which brings the potential benefit of being able to profit more from the general Django packages ecosystem.
Since you’re depending on smaller pieces of additional software it will generally be possible to upgrade to new Django versions quicker. This isn’t true for all packages of course, and I’m a reluctant maintainer of some of them. Anecdotes aren’t data, but I see that some larger CMS systems are definitely having a hard time keeping up with Django’s release schedule.
I’m not trying to say that the Django admin is a better CMS than other Django-based CMS, or any other CMS. I’m saying it’s a trade off and you should be mindful of the downsides of choosing a larger system. And I’m saying that the people who tell you that you shouldn’t be using the Django admin interface are wrong in the first approximation.
The fact that it’s so easy to spin up an additional site and with minimal effort and still be able to work with clean database schemas and all the great tools Django (and Python) offers is important for those of us who are working on many different projects with limited financial resources, because the website often is for example just a small part of a campaign.