Introduction

When developing an app, there is often a need to populate it with data and then alter that data. We have already seen in Chapter 2, Models and Migrations, how this can be done on the command line using the Python manage.py shell. In Chapter 3, URL Mapping, Views, and Templates, we learned how to develop a web form interface to our model using Django's views and templates. But neither of these approaches is ideal for administering the data from the classes in reviews/models.py. Using the shell to manage data is too technical for non-programmers and building individual web pages would be a laborious process as it would see us repeating the same view logic and very similar template features for each table in the model. Fortunately, a solution to this problem was devised in the early days of Django when it was still being developed.

Django admin is actually written as a Django app. It offers an intuitively rendered web interface to give administrative access to the...