Creating a blog with django, part 2: admin interface

In part2 of this series, we defined the models for our blog application. However, aside from python manage.py shell, we don't yet have a way to create and edit blog posts or categories. For this, we need to enable django's admin interface.

Note: this tutorial was written for django 1.3, and is therefore out of date.

If you haven't already done so, enable the admin interface by adding django.contrib.admin to the INSTALLED_APPS setting, and uncommenting the relevant lines in the main project urlconf, mysite/urls.py.

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from django.conf.urls.defaults import patterns, include, url

# Uncomment the next two lines to enable the admin:
from django.contrib import admin
admin.autodiscover()

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    # Examples:
    # url(r'^$', 'mysite.views.home', name='home'),
    # url(r'^mysite/', include('mysite.foo.urls')),

    # Uncomment the admin/doc line below to enable admin documentation:
    # url(r'^admin/doc/', include('django.contrib.admindocs.urls')),

    # Uncomment the next line to enable the admin:
    url(r'^admin/', include(admin.site.urls)),
)

Create a file called admin.py in the directory containing the blog app.

First, we need to import the admin module and the models which we wish to add to the admin interface.

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# admin.py

from django.contrib import admin
from mysite.blog.models import Post, Tag

Next we register our models with the admin site.

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admin.site.register(Post)
admin.site.register(Tag)

At this point if you start the test server and go to http://127.0.0.1:8000/admin/ you will see that the Post and Tag models have been added.

Screenshot of admin interface

However, if you create a couple of blog post and then try to view the list of posts, this is what you will see:

Screenshot of admin interface Screenshot of admin interface

In order to rectify this, we need to add a __unicode__ method to each of our models.

# models.py

class Post(models.Model):
....
    def __unicode__(self):
        return self.title

class Tag(models.Model):
....
    def __unicode__(self):
        return self.name

Finally, we want the admin interface to generate the slug field automatically from the title field. To do this, we add the following lines to the admin.py file.

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class PostAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    prepopulated_fields = {"slug": ("title",)}

We then add 'PostAdmin' as the second argument to the call which registers Post with the admin interface.

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admin.site.register(Post, PostAdmin)

Now you will see that the slug field is automatically filled in when you enter a title for your blog post. Here's the complete code for reference:

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# admin.py

from django.contrib import admin
from mysite.blog.models import Post, Tag

class PostAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    prepopulated_fields = {"slug": ("title",)}

admin.site.register(Post, PostAdmin)
admin.site.register(Tag)

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# models.py

from django.db import models
from datetime import datetime

class Tag(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=20, unique=True)

    def __unicode__(self):
        return self.name

class Post(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=120)
    slug = models.SlugField(max_length=120, unique_for_date='publication_date')
    publication_date = models.DateTimeField(default=datetime.now)
    body = models.TextField()
    tags = models.ManyToManyField(Tag)

    def __unicode__(self):
        return self.title

That concludes this installment. Next time we'll get to the real meat of the project - using Django's generic class-based views.