Extending with plugins remotely -at least from a frontend

[Joel Tanko]

Hi guys I have a question just one, but it houses a myriad of smaller questions for clarity.

So I'm building a django app that creates virtual organizations, I'm planning on hosting with digitalocean for reasons. My app just creates a droplet and host a site ( already done that)

Now I want my users ( mainly people with zero coding knowledge or ability) to be able to install plugins to their django site using the frontend.

 How do I get this working without users tampering with the settings.py file

 

> is it possible?

> what packages would I need?

> how would I setup the installation process?

PS: a example would be how shopify handles its plugins and installation from the frontend remotely - if shopify were built on django.

Cheers!

[Ryan Nowakowski]

In general, the philosophy behind Django is that programmers modify
code, editors/authors modify content. The idea is that editors/authors
don't know enough about code and can sometimes get themselves into a
jam. So it's best to not allow editors/authors to modify the code.
See "Wordpress plugin hell"[1] for reference.

Of course, just because Django doesn't encourage author-installed
plugins doesn't mean that you can't do it. Django CMS has an addon
marketplace[2], for example.

One thing that might help is to note that settings.py is just a python
module. You can call normal python code inside that module. So, for
example, you could store all your settings in a database. There are
some examples of this kind of thing under the heading "live
settings"[3].

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=wordpress+plugin+hell
[2] https://marketplace.django-cms.org/en/addons/
[3] https://djangopackages.org/grids/g/live-setting/