[Solved]-Valid use case for django admin?

I would suggest you to create a Person model which contains a OneToOneField to the User model(Admin site User model.). Some what like this..

from django.contrib.auth.models import User

    class Person(models.Model):
        """The person class FKs to the User class and contains additional user information
        including userImage, country, etc"""

        user = models.OneToOneField(User, related_name='person_fk')
        url = models.URLField(max_length=255, blank=True)
        country = models.CharField(max_length=2, blank=True)
        state = models.CharField(max_length=50, blank=True)
        zipCode = models.IntegerField(max_length=7, blank=True, null=True)
        userImage = models.ImageField(upload_to=generate_filename, blank=True, null=True)

I wouldn’t consider editing my personal profile on a website an administrative task. I think django-profiles is what you are looking for.

Django’s model for authorization is a little too simplistic. It is just checks for permission on the Model as a whole.

For this kind of thing, you are pretty much forced to write your own view functions that handle the additional check.

After you’ve written one or two, you’ll see the pattern. Then you can think about writing your own decorator to handle this.

def profileView( request, object_id ):
    p= Profile.objects.get( id=int(object_id) )
    if request.session['user'] != p.get_user():
        # respond with a 401 not authorized or a helpful message
    # process normally, since the session['user'] is the user for the Profile.

For the above to work, you’ll need to enable sessions, and be sure you record the user in the session when they login successfully. You’ll also need to eradicate the session when they logout.

Just for reference, here’s a snippet demonstrating how you can fairly easily achieve this effect (users can only edit their “own” objects) in the Django admin. Caveat: I wouldn’t recommend doing this for user profiles, it’ll be easier and more flexible to just create your own edit view using a ModelForm.

There are a few django pluggable apps that allow row level permissions on your admin model. However, I’d be more inclined to write my own view that allows users to do it from within the application.

I had similar aspirations (using the admin contrib) when designing the app I’m currently working on, but decided that the admin app really is for admin use, and that regular users should be given their own pages to do the work and customisation (if required).

You can easily generate the CRUD views for a particular model using generic views and modelforms, and just apply style sheets for consistent look with the rest of your application.