Accidental Music Video: Django – Flex

Django-Flex is an open-source Django app designed to help developers create flexible and powerful admin interfaces for their Django projects. With Django-Flex, you can easily customize the look and feel of your admin panels, add new functionality, and create dynamic dashboards without having to write a lot of custom code.

In this tutorial, we will walk you through the process of setting up Django-Flex in your Django project and show you how to create a simple music video admin panel using Django-Flex.

Step 1: Install Django-Flex

To get started, you first need to install Django-Flex. You can do this using pip:

pip install django-flex

Once Django-Flex is installed, add it to your INSTALLED_APPS in your project’s settings.py file:

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    ...
    'flex',
    ...
]

Step 2: Create a Model for Music Videos

Next, you need to create a model for your music videos in your Django project. This model will define the fields and data that you want to store for each music video. Here’s an example of a simple music video model:

from django.db import models

class MusicVideo(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    artist = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    url = models.URLField()
    thumbnail = models.ImageField()

Make sure to run python manage.py makemigrations and python manage.py migrate to create the database table for your music videos.

Step 3: Create a Flex Dashboard

Now that you have your music video model set up, you can create a Flex dashboard to display your music videos. To do this, create a new Django app in your project (e.g., music_videos) and add a new flex_dashboard.py file:

from flex import dashboard

class MusicVideosDashboard(dashboard.Dashboard):
    title = 'Music Videos'
    model = 'music_videos.musicvideo'
    search_fields = ['title', 'artist']
    list_display = ['title', 'artist', 'thumbnail']

In this dashboard class, we are setting the title of the dashboard to ‘Music Videos’, specifying the model we want to display (MusicVideo), defining the fields we want to search on, and setting the fields we want to display in the list view.

Step 4: Add the Flex Dashboard to Your Admin Panel

Finally, you need to add the Flex dashboard to your Django admin panel. To do this, go to your admin.py file in your music_videos app and import the MusicVideosDashboard class:

from flex import admin

admin.register(MusicVideosDashboard)

Now, when you access your Django admin panel, you should see a new section called ‘Music Videos’ with a list of all the music videos you have added to your database. You can search for videos, sort them, and view their details in the admin panel.

And that’s it! You have successfully set up Django-Flex in your Django project and created a music video admin panel using Django-Flex. You can now customize the dashboard further, add new functionality, and create dynamic interfaces for your Django project using Django-Flex.