The Django administration site is great — fully-featured, easy to use, secure by design, rock solid … and somewhat ugly, which can be something of a downside when you want to integrate it with the look and feel of the rest of your website. Let’s sort that out.

If It Ain’t Broke …

Say you’ve just prototyped a web app with Django and Vue.js. For a wide array of cases, using Django’s admin for back office purposes as is, and even handling it over to your client after appropriately setting permissions, is just fine. After all, it works perfectly well and it can be heavily customized with the built-in tools to cover many situations.

So again, why bother?

Reasons to Hack the Look and Feel of the Admin

However, there are a number of valid reasons to take integration a step further:

• Branding: there’s nothing wrong in wanting the name and colors of your company instead of “Django administration” (and for the record, this is in compliance with Django’s BSD license).
• Seamless integration between main site and admin: you might want to be able to transition between back office functionality while navigating the site, and vice versa, by having a common navigation bar.
• Prettifying: while the admin looks okay, and it has even implemented responsive web design principles ever since v2 (it works well on both, mobile and desktop), there’s a lot a well-crafted style sheet can do to make it look better.
• Bypass functionality: you might also just want to create custom dropdown menus for the admin, displaying the options that you actually use and hiding from the user interface what you don’t really need, which could make for a better user experience.

#django #bootstrap #web-development