Django grappelli

Question

Does anyone here use django-grappelli here ?

I would like to read some experience of developers or users, if there are common mistake to avoid or why you use or do not use grappelli.

Thanks for sharing

Answer 1

I'm using grappelli as well. I'd be content with django's normal admin, but if you need to present the backend to someone else grappelli is much more appealing.

The current grappelli version 2.1 is working quite good with django 1.2. The only problems you(sometimes) run into is that 3rd party apps have sometimes some problems, which you can solve in most cases quite easily with changing the custom templates they are coming with (in most cases it's just other names for css classes etc, sometimes there are some js incompatibilities as well, which you can solve easily!

The actual version of grappelli also has a nicer html/css framework which enables you to easily use their styles/ui elements in your own templates. Have a look at http://grappelliproject.com/ for that (it's not totally valid for the actual version but gives you a small impression on what to expect!)

According to the developers, grappelli should soon work together with the marvellous django-admin-tools,which offer you drop down menus within the admin and a customizable index dashboard! Installation is not quite complicated, just do not forget to pass the adminmedia folder to manage.py! All in all I think it's quite recommendable (also check out django-filebrowser and medman if you dont know them yet, which come from the same developers and work very well together with grappelli)!

Answer 2

I have used Grappelli several places and suggest using it, if you are using admin for anything more than a "database debugging" purpose.

From django 1.1.1 onwards, you can create multiple instances of admin, so generally, I keep the main admin to examine the data as it is, and another instance of it for using purpose, with grappelli.

A minor issue is that,

On the dev server, it is hard to ask django to use a different admin media folder, and the easiest way is to use the command line parameter, as it is documented.

Answer 3

I started using django-grappelli recently and will like to point out 2 cases that newbies like me have a high chance of wasting time on:

1. For Django==1.6, use grappelli==2.5 and not the current latest 2.6. Also for Django==1.5/1.4 use grappelli==2.4.The official docs clearly mention it but many may overlook it and later wonder why it is not working.

2. In INSTALLED_APPS setting, if grappelli is not placed above django default apps it will not work. I used to think that order is not of importance for INSTALLED_APPS but this made me change my mind.