Day 12 - Admin interface beginning

First, make a few changes to your settings file:

1. Add 'django.contrib.admin' to the INSTALLED_APPS setting. (The order of INSTALLED_APPS doesn’t matter, but we like to keep things alphabetical so it’s easy for a human to read.)
2. Make sure INSTALLED_APPS contains 'django.contrib.auth', 'django.contrib.contenttypes','django.contrib.messages' and 'django.contrib.sessions'. The Django admin site requires these three packages. (If you’re following along with our ongoing mysite project, note that we commented out these fourINSTALLED_APPS entries in Chapter 5. Uncomment them now.)
3. Make sure MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES contains 'django.middleware.common.CommonMiddleware','django.contrib.messages.middleware.MessageMiddleware','django.contrib.sessions.middleware.SessionMiddleware' and'django.contrib.auth.middleware.AuthenticationMiddleware'. (Again, if you’re following along, note that we commented them out in Chapter 5, so uncomment them.)

Second, run python manage.py syncdb. This step will install the extra database tables that the admin interface uses. The first time you run syncdb with 'django.contrib.auth' in INSTALLED_APPS, you’ll be asked about creating a superuser. If you don’t do this, you’ll need to run python manage.py createsuperuser separately to create an admin user account; otherwise, you won’t be able to log in to the admin site. (Potential gotcha: thepython manage.py createsuperuser command is only available if 'django.contrib.auth' is in yourINSTALLED_APPS.)

Third, add the admin site to your URLconf (in urls.py, remember). By default, the urls.py generated bydjango-admin.py startproject contains commented-out code for the Django admin, and all you have to do is uncomment it. For the record, here are the bits you need to make sure are in there:

# Include these import statements...
from django.contrib import admin
admin.autodiscover()

# And include this URLpattern...
urlpatterns = patterns('',
    # ...
    (r'^admin/', include(admin.site.urls)),
    # ...
)