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I've been out of web development for about four years now, but I think Django is unusual in providing the admin dashboard for free. Most frameworks don't want t

I've been out of web development for about four years now, but I think Django is unusual in providing the admin dashboard for free. Most frameworks don't want to devote the resources to that when there are third-party options you can fairly easily (ha ha) bolt on to your project. Speculatively, it may be that Django comes from a time before such a wide variety of self-service solutions existed, and based on the newspaper use case they built the framework to support, they felt like it was worth the time to do it.

simonw 3y ago
We originally created Django as a CMS for some newspaper websites. We didn't even think of it as a framework - we called it "the CMS" for the first ~10 months that we were working on it. https://simonwillison.net/2010/Aug/24/what-is-the-history/ https://simonwillison.net/2010/Aug/24/what-is-the-history/
- stuartjohnson12 3y ago
  I'm curious how you think about Django's CMS capabilities compared to less opinionated languages and frameworks. Do you think the fact that Django is so opinionated is necessary for Django to be as good as it is? If Django was built more like FastAPI could something like Django Admin still work? Is Django Admin special because of the execution, or because of the capabilities that the design of Django enables it to have?
  - simonw 3y ago
    Personally I think it's mainly down to the fact that the ORM and admin were designed together, with the intention of supporting the subset of operations needed to build a CMS. That's one of the reasons it doesn't support things like compound primary keys very well - it turns out you don't really need those for the common CMS subset of functionality.
stuartjohnson12 3y ago
What third party options would you recommend? I'm aware of ReTool and Airplane.dev, but both of them feel like I'm a technician fighting an interface and not a software engineer writing functionality.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- hdoan741 3y ago
  I'm from Retool and I agree with you a lot of things we can do better. IMO Retool is best as a simple way to build UI with drag-n-drop. For actual business logic, it should be left written in your own backend, and we can do better in connecting the two. We're working on a solution for this, which will allow you to connect Retool UI to your backend & ORM directly. LMK if you're interested in trying it out!

simonw 3y ago

We originally created Django as a CMS for some newspaper websites. We didn't even think of it as a framework - we called it "the CMS" for the first ~10 months that we were working on it. https://simonwillison.net/2010/Aug/24/what-is-the-history/ https://simonwillison.net/2010/Aug/24/what-is-the-history/

stuartjohnson12 3y ago
I'm curious how you think about Django's CMS capabilities compared to less opinionated languages and frameworks. Do you think the fact that Django is so opinionated is necessary for Django to be as good as it is? If Django was built more like FastAPI could something like Django Admin still work? Is Django Admin special because of the execution, or because of the capabilities that the design of Django enables it to have?
- simonw 3y ago
  Personally I think it's mainly down to the fact that the ORM and admin were designed together, with the intention of supporting the subset of operations needed to build a CMS. That's one of the reasons it doesn't support things like compound primary keys very well - it turns out you don't really need those for the common CMS subset of functionality.

stuartjohnson12 3y ago

What third party options would you recommend? I'm aware of ReTool and Airplane.dev, but both of them feel like I'm a technician fighting an interface and not a software engineer writing functionality.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
hdoan741 3y ago
I'm from Retool and I agree with you a lot of things we can do better. IMO Retool is best as a simple way to build UI with drag-n-drop. For actual business logic, it should be left written in your own backend, and we can do better in connecting the two. We're working on a solution for this, which will allow you to connect Retool UI to your backend & ORM directly. LMK if you're interested in trying it out!