Here's what I've found... Start with the very useful tutorial at http://www.djangoproject.com/documentation/forms/ - in general it's very helpful, but there are some small gaps in the documentation, which would certainly have helped me
#1: I'd emphasize that this document (http://www.djangoproject.com/documentation/forms/), will help djangonauts get a lot of the adminy goodness into their own apps. Big win to the django team. #2: The date and time javascript widgets are what I wanted most of all. It would be handy if the example model included a DateTime field. Here's what I have; startdate = meta.DateTimeField(db_column='start_date') # there were too many underscores, I wanted to keep it simple!! This is represented in the form template like this; <div class="form-row"> <label for="id_startdate_date">Start Date:</label> <p class="datetime"> {{ form.startdate_date }} {{ form.startdate_time }} <br/> </p> {% if form.startdate.errors %}*** {{ form.startdate.errors|join:", " }}{% endif %} <br/> </div> The big thing here is that the field 'startdate' is expanded out in the form, _date and _time are made available (this may have been where I went wrong, my initial attempt had {{ form.start_date }}, but I never saw any content in the form). #3: There seems to be an error in the code for loading up an edit_form. The example document has this; if request.POST: new_data = request.POST.copy() errors = manipulator.get_validation_errors(new_data) if not errors: manipulator.do_html2python(new_data) manipulator.save(new_data) # Do a post-after-redirect so that reload works, etc. return HttpResponseRedirect("/places/edit/%i/" % place.id) else: errors = {} # This makes sure the form accurate represents the fields of the place. new_data = place.__dict__ *no way* could I get this to work, I had to do this instead if request.POST: new_data = request.POST.copy() errors = manipulator.get_validation_errors(new_data) if not errors: manipulator.do_html2python(new_data) manipulator.save(new_data) # Do a post-after-redirect so that reload works, etc. return HttpResponseRedirect("/resources/edit/%i/" % resource.id) else: errors = {} # This makes sure the form accurate represents the fields of the place. #new_data = resource.__dict__ new_data = manipulator.flatten_data() Note that new_data = resource.__dict__ is replaced with new_data = manipulator.flatten_data() Ok, nearly there, but could I get the clock and calendar widgets? Nope - I used Xylescope to check on the CSS, I used alerts in the Javascript etc. etc. and then I found it was stopping on gettext... Some additional digging provided this jewel; i18n.txt in the docs. Add this; (r'^jsi18n/$', 'django.views.i18n.javascript_catalog', {'packages': 'django.conf'}), to your urls.py for your application, make sure that your header HTML looks *something* like this; <script type="text/javascript" src="../../../jsi18n/"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="/media/js/core.js"></script><script type="text/javascript" src="/media/js/admin/RelatedObjectLookups.js"></script><script type="text/javascript" src="/media/js/calendar.js"></script><script type="text/javascript" src="/media/js/admin/DateTimeShortcuts.js"></script> And Bob's your Uncle, Fannys your Aunt (ie the javascript widgets work). Hope this helps ;) Cheers, Tone
