I've always wondered how to handle those single-record things in a CMS-driven site. You know what I mean — the home page hero, the blog page header, the pricing section banner. They're not a list. There's no "add another." There's exactly one of them, and a non-technical client or even your future self needs to be able to edit them from an admin panel without touching code.
For the longest time I either hardcoded the content and lived with the guilt, or reached for something heavyweight like Wagtail. But neither felt right for a lean Django + React setup.
The actual answer turned out to be embarrassingly simple: the singleton model pattern.
The Problem
Django models are designed to store collections of things. But some things aren't collections — they're configuration. A home page header isn't a list of headers. It's the header. One row. Forever.
