Django Tutorial: How To Customize The Admin Interface In Django

Описание: In this Django tutorial, we are going to learn how to customize the admin interface. Django ships with many of options to improve the Django admin interface. We will take a look at many of them in this tutorial. Let's get started.

How To Customize The Admin Interface In Django
When making changes to the admin interface it's highly recommended that we add a class to our admin file that in encapsolates our options code. We add the class above registering our model and call this class AppnameAdmin so in our case our new class will be called LessonAdmin.

Let's create our class. Create a class in your admin.py file call it LessonAdmin and place it above our lesson admin registration. This class is a subclass that inherits from ModelAdmin class. So, we need to add admin.ModelAdmin to inhertate from the ModelAdmin class.

Code Example
from django.contrib import admin

Register your models here.
from .models import Lesson

class LessonAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
#add options here

admin.site.register(Lesson)
Now that we have create the subclass of ModelAdmin we need to hook it into the register of our model. We will place our class name in the register function as an argument. This will allow for our options to be availiable in our admin interface.

Code Example
from django.contrib import admin

Register your models here.
from .models import Lesson

class LessonAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
#add options here
pass

admin.site.register(Lesson, LessonAdmin)
Now that we have set up our subclass of ModelAdmin and hooked the subclass into the our register function we can now start too change our display a bit.

Change List Display
Currently our list display only displays the title of our lesson. The list display would be more helpful if it displayed more useful content. For example, maybe if we displayed the slug, publish date and if the lesson was set to draft or plubished status.

Code Example

from django.contrib import admin

Register your models here.
from .models import Lesson

class LessonAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
#add options here
list_display = ('title', 'slug','created', 'status')

admin.site.register(Lesson, LessonAdmin)
Admin Interface

list_display Django

Cool now we are able to see some good content in our list view. How about we add some more functionality to our admin interface.

Add List Filter
The filter feature is great for working with time like published and updated in our model or choices like status in our model. It adds a list of filters that we can use to filter through our lessons. We will add a filter for status, created and updated.

The Code

from django.contrib import admin

Register your models here.
from .models import Lesson

class LessonAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
#add options here
list_display = ('title', 'slug','created', 'status')
list_filter = ('created', 'updated', 'status')

admin.site.register(Lesson, LessonAdmin)
Admin Interface

filter admin interface django

Search Fields
It would be nice to be able to search our lessons. Django has a feature that will allow us to search through content and display the matching lessons. We will make the title field and body field searchable in our interface.

The Code

from django.contrib import admin

Register your models here.
from .models import Lesson

class LessonAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
#add options here
list_display = ('title', 'slug','created', 'status')
list_filter = ('created', 'updated', 'status')
search_fields = ('title', 'body')

admin.site.register(Lesson, LessonAdmin)
The Admin Interface

search fields in Django Admin

Prepopulated Fields
In the previous tutorial I mentioned I would like the slug field to be created on its own so we did not need to do it ourselfes. To this we use prepopulated_fields to populate the field for use. We will prepopulate the slug field from the title field. The prepopulated_fields uses some build in javascript to instancely populate the fields.

The Code

from django.contrib import admin

Register your models here.
from .models import Lesson

class LessonAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
#add options here
list_display = ('title', 'slug','created', 'status')
list_filter = ('created', 'updated', 'status')
search_fields = ('title', 'body')
prepopulated_fields = {'slug': ('title', )}

admin.site.register(Lesson, LessonAdmin)
Add a new lesson and when you start to type the title you will notice that the slug field will start to change as well.

Conclusion
For now our admin interface is looking pretty good. We may need to make changes in the future but we are making headway here. If you have any questions about how to customize the admin interface leave a comment below.