The admin application

With Django it’s easy to integrate your own application into the admin application.

Registering the application in the admin app

To use our application with the admin app, we have to register its models.

This is done by creating the file admin.py in the application directory. The project structure now looks like this:

cookbook
|-- cookbook
|   |-- __init__.py
|   |-- settings.py
|   |-- urls.py
|   `-- wsgi.py
|-- manage.py
`-- recipes
    |-- admin.py
    |-- __init__.py
    |-- models.py
    |-- tests.py
    `-- views.py

Now open admin.py in your editor and insert the following lines:

from django.contrib import admin
from .models import Category, Recipe

This makes the admin and your app’s models available.

Note

The second import is a relative import. These are defined in PEP 328 and implemented in Python 2.6 and above. In Python 2.5 you have to insert the following line before the relative import:

from __future__ import absolute_import

Next we create a class to register the model Category with the admin:

class CategoryAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    prepopulated_fields = {'slug': ['name']}


admin.site.register(Category, CategoryAdmin)

And that’s all.

The attribute prepopulated_fields tells the admin application to automatically fill the field slug - in this case with the text entered into the name field.

Now we do the same with the Recipe model:

class RecipeAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    prepopulated_fields = {'slug': ['title']}


admin.site.register(Recipe, RecipeAdmin)

The whole file

The file admin.py should now look like this (starting with Python 2.6, for Python 2.5 see the note above):

from django.contrib import admin
from .models import Category, Recipe


class CategoryAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    prepopulated_fields = {'slug': ['name']}


class RecipeAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    prepopulated_fields = {'slug': ['title']}


admin.site.register(Category, CategoryAdmin)
admin.site.register(Recipe, RecipeAdmin)

Resources

• Information about the admin application