I am working on a framework that lets you easily create tools inside the Django Admin - https://djangocontrolroom.com
I've published several panels under this banner already (tools for redis, caches, celery, etc.); I am currently working on a base library layer for tools to inherit from and to make it easier to create new tools.
Essentially, the point of all of this is to make it so that you don't need so many external services; Instead, DCR provides self hosted alternatives. This in turn makes it a lot easier to build and productionalize something using Django.
Reception has been decent so far and I estimate several thousand current adopters (Its hard to estimate based on download numbers alone.) For May I will finalize a common design language, further formalize the plugin system and how it works, and likely release a new panel.
If you work with Django long enough, and at significant scale, you live long enough to b̶e̶c̶o̶m̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶v̶i̶l̶l̶a̶i̶n̶ make hacky extensions to the admin.
I am hoping this work makes it easier for people to start extending the admin in a normalized way.
I think any large enough django project has toyed around with extending the admin in some way. Hopefully this project can help establish a standard to make this sort of thing easier.
I think its good advice to avoid the admin for customer facing use cases. But for internal facing tools It seems pretty wasteful to not use the built in admin - it has all the bells as whistles to build upon (auth, permissions, etc.)
In my view. Building things with AI creates the need for common patterns and guardrails (i.e. frameworks) Then as these new apps become productionalized - tooling that fits your framework starts to become more important.
In that sense, AI increases the need for good patterns around observability. This project aims to make this a little easier to do for Django right from inside the framework as opposed to an external service.
I think even if AI handles more of the CRUD side, you still need to understand what’s happening in the system once it’s running - this is where this project fits in.
To your point about framework use because of AI: As more applications are being built because of lowering barriers, I think it makes sense for full stack monolithic frameworks to be used more frequently.
Totally understand - I am a long time flower user for example, and I am familiar with having to harden that installation a bit.
What I'm aiming for here is slightly different - keeping everything inside Django so there are no extra services to run or configure or proxy. As long as you surface the admin somewhere, then that is the place to find your tooling (including celery monitoring)
There will always be room for both approaches. A lightweight proxy/redirect could be something to explore in the future.