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I'm looking at the django admin interface and I see a very superficial admin interface. I am not sure why it's so lauded when the rails scaffold gives you 90% o

I'm looking at the django admin interface and I see a very superficial admin interface. I am not sure why it's so lauded when the rails scaffold gives you 90% of that out of the box albeit in a style neutral way which is easy enough to gemify. are aesthetics what people are so craving for this? there's no search. nothing that stands out as a killer admin panel. I used to program django professionally around 2007ish and it doesn't seem like much has changed with the admin site... am i wrong?

sroerick 2y ago
No, I don’t think so. It’s just a preference thing. I think that the rails scaffolding is definitely comparable. For most apps in Django I ultimately move away from admin in production towards custom views. There is a search fields feature, which I use frequently, but it might not do what you’re looking for. I think user permissioning and the audit trail are pretty useful in the early stages of an app. At the end of the day, crud is crud, and if you have a workflow that works for you nothing the admin panel offers is going to save you all that much time. Rails scaffolding is a similar way. It’s just one workflow. I’m doing a side project in Go right now, which is decidedly not “batteries included”, and I love it. Go and htmx are kind of a match made in heaven. That doesn’t mean I think Django Admin or Rails Scaffolding are useless, they’re just a convenience. I rolled my own login system, cause it’s fun. Is Django user land or Devise more secure? Absolutely. Is it necessary for what I’m doing? Nope. My personal preference is that if I’m doing app design or consumer facing work, Rails seems stronger. For internal tooling, data analysis work, or geospatial work, I reach to Django to have those Python libraries available.
Lutger 2y ago
Django admin also has various ways of filtering, search, navigation including menu's, pagination, permissions, custom actions and change tracking out of the box. Most importantly, it also includes ways to easily deal with relations (inline admins). Last time I programmed with rails was many years ago, but none of these things are included in the default scaffolds right? I understand the comparison with scaffolding, but I don't think they really overlap too much. You'd typically throw away a lot of the generated scaffolds from rails for a production app. They are more of a tool to avoid having to manually write boilerplate code, increasing productivity and (maybe) reducing errors. But django admin interface is meant for production, though often more as a backend tool than a customer facing interface. Different purposed. I miss the scaffolding in django and the admin interface in rails.

sroerick 2y ago

No, I don’t think so. It’s just a preference thing. I think that the rails scaffolding is definitely comparable. For most apps in Django I ultimately move away from admin in production towards custom views. There is a search fields feature, which I use frequently, but it might not do what you’re looking for. I think user permissioning and the audit trail are pretty useful in the early stages of an app. At the end of the day, crud is crud, and if you have a workflow that works for you nothing the admin panel offers is going to save you all that much time. Rails scaffolding is a similar way. It’s just one workflow. I’m doing a side project in Go right now, which is decidedly not “batteries included”, and I love it. Go and htmx are kind of a match made in heaven. That doesn’t mean I think Django Admin or Rails Scaffolding are useless, they’re just a convenience. I rolled my own login system, cause it’s fun. Is Django user land or Devise more secure? Absolutely. Is it necessary for what I’m doing? Nope. My personal preference is that if I’m doing app design or consumer facing work, Rails seems stronger. For internal tooling, data analysis work, or geospatial work, I reach to Django to have those Python libraries available.

Lutger 2y ago

Django admin also has various ways of filtering, search, navigation including menu's, pagination, permissions, custom actions and change tracking out of the box. Most importantly, it also includes ways to easily deal with relations (inline admins). Last time I programmed with rails was many years ago, but none of these things are included in the default scaffolds right? I understand the comparison with scaffolding, but I don't think they really overlap too much. You'd typically throw away a lot of the generated scaffolds from rails for a production app. They are more of a tool to avoid having to manually write boilerplate code, increasing productivity and (maybe) reducing errors. But django admin interface is meant for production, though often more as a backend tool than a customer facing interface. Different purposed. I miss the scaffolding in django and the admin interface in rails.