./cmsimike

This will be a really quick post since, for whatever reason, I could not find this information out easy on the internet. The only reason I was able to find it is due to my great and good friend, Andres Buritica’s help. Starting a Django project, then an app gives you a models.py which Django expects to house all the models. This does not seem like the best of ideas, so obviously I want to split up the models into their own files in a specific model directory. To accomplish this, you must do two things:

1. Create a meta class for the model with a field “app_label” being set to the name of your app
2. In your __init__.py file, import that model.

For example, if you started an app by typing out ‘python manage.py startapp foo’, you can delete your models.py file, replace it with a directory named models (what I do), and inside have an __init__.py and Bar.py files.
in Bar.py:

from django.db import models
 
class Bar(models.Model):
    bar    = models.TextField(blank=False)
 
    class Meta:
        app_label = "foo"

then in __init__.py:

from Bar import Bar

This also goes for other things specified outside of the Django “norm” I guess?
If I wanted to associate Bar with the admin, I create a subdirectory inside my app named admin, and inside it I have
BarAdmin.py

from foo.models import Bar
from django.contrib import admin
 
admin.site.register(Bar)

Inside the __init__.py for the admin subdirectory, you’d have:

import BarAdmin

Now I could be doing this all wrong but this is the only way I managed to get everything working. If there is a better way to do this, I am all ears. To you Django/Python professionals out there, this may be common knowledge but I am noobing it up right now trying to better learn Python and Django.