> The easy stuff is very easy, which is great, but when you want to do something somewhat complex it becomes arcane very quickly, usually requiring step-debugging through the code to figure out which framework method needs to be tweaked.
This is the same problem I have with most ORM's as well: the easy stuff is easy, and the hard stuff is harder than just doing your own thing (using SQL directly). My solution to this ORM problem and the admin situation is the same: use admin (and ORM) for doing easy things, and don't use it for hard things. It works well!
I've seen a lot of Django codebases where they try to build the whole app around the admin interface, and it's way more trouble than it's worth. Reasonable people could disagree about this, but my stance is to use it for the easy goodness it provides, but get away from it when it starts getting in the way.
> use admin (and ORM) for doing easy things, and don't use it for hard things. It works well!
With the ORM though there is usually a good reason for why the hard things are hard, and writing your own SQL where needed adds very little friction.
With the admin adding a button to kick off some task should be trivially easy, but for whatever reason involves either using all sorts of terrible hacks that make the codebase completely unreadable, or else creating an entire second admin. That doesn't feel right.
Yeah adding buttons to the top of a detail page, or a second form page for an admin action are unnecessarily hard. I've had to do both a number of times in the last few months, and referring back to an existing implementation is the only way I remember how to do it.
Those two particular customisations should be a lot easier to do, and it might even be something I'll look to implement as a 3rd party library or directly within Django.
This is the same problem I have with most ORM's as well: the easy stuff is easy, and the hard stuff is harder than just doing your own thing (using SQL directly). My solution to this ORM problem and the admin situation is the same: use admin (and ORM) for doing easy things, and don't use it for hard things. It works well!
I've seen a lot of Django codebases where they try to build the whole app around the admin interface, and it's way more trouble than it's worth. Reasonable people could disagree about this, but my stance is to use it for the easy goodness it provides, but get away from it when it starts getting in the way.