2.6 KiB
21. Use Django Admin for Application Management
Date: 2023-06-22
Status
Accepted
Context
CISA needs a way to perform administrative actions to manage the new get.gov application as well as the .gov domain application requests submitted. Analysts need to be able to view, review, and approve domain applications. Other dashboard views, reports, searches (with filters and sorting) are also highly desired.
Decision
Use Django's Admin site for administrative actions. Django Admin gives administrators all the powers we anticipate needing (and more), with relatively little overhead on the development team.
Consequences
Django admin provides the team with a huge head start on the creation of an administrator portal.
While Django Admin is highly customizable, design and development will be constrained by what is possible within Django Admin.
We anticipate that this will, overall, speed up the time to MVP compared to building a completely custom solution.
Django Admin offers omnipotence for administrators out of the box, with direct access to database objects. This includes the ability to put the application and its data in an erroneous state, based on otherwise normal business rules/logic.
In contrast to building an admin interface from scratch where development activities would predominantly involve building up, leveraging Django Admin will require carefully pairing back the functionalities available to users such as analysts.
On accessibility: Django admin is almost fully accessible out-of-the-box, the exceptions being tables, checkboxes, and color contrast. We have remedied the first 2 with template overrides and the 3rd with theming (see below).
On USWDS and theming: Django admin brings its own high level design framework. We have determined that theming on top of Django (scss) is easy and worthwhile, while overwriting Django's templates with USWDS is hard and provides little return on investment (research PR).
While we anticipate that Django Admin will meet (or even exceed) the user needs that we are aware of today, it is still an open question whether Django Admin will be the long-term administrator tool of choice. A pivot away from Django Admin in the future would of course mean starting from scratch at a later date, and potentially juggling two separate admin portals for a period of time while a custom solution is incrementally developed. This would result in an overall increase to the total amount of time invested in building an administrator portal.