Customize Django Admin Interface

The Django admin is a superpower, it&#x27;s a x10 productivity multiplayer at the beginning of (or even far to far into) a project.<p>However, I also dislike so much of it. The hacks I have used to contort it to do what I want I would be embarrassed for another developer to see...<p>Former Django fellow Carlton is working on a nice toolkit called &quot;Neapolitan&quot;, it&#x27;s early stage, but is designed to enable building CRUD views very quickly. There is a good chance that in time it, or a layer on top of it, will become the perfect successor to the Admin.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;carltongibson&#x2F;neapolitan">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;carltongibson&#x2F;neapolitan</a>

I&#x27;m sort of fascinated by the resilience of the Django admin. It&#x27;s nearly 20 years old at this point and really hasn&#x27;t changed too much since I first used it in 2007. I&#x27;ve always thought it was a good example of what having a strong designer early in your project life-cycle can do.

We use the Django Admin A LOT. It&#x27;s an amazing power. Lately, we&#x27;ve also added a Jupyter server connected to a read-only DB replica, with the Django models available.<p>It&#x27;s impressive how much you can do with these two tools. There&#x27;s no need for an internal management dashboard or a BI tool. Just the admin and a bunch of notebooks.<p>(Obligatory note: we are a bootstrapped startup)

I’ve found htmx to be the ultimate Django customising machine. Just make an htmx view and stick it anywhere in your admin. You can do this either by overriding a specific model admin’s template for more complex logic (for example the change template), or by sticking the htmx view in an admin read only field (super simple and works very well).<p>This approach allows you to have some very complex views in the Django admin without ever touching the internal of the Django admin itself. I used to waste hours trying to get the admin to do what I wanted until I figured out this neat little trick.

Just want to chime in and say I&#x27;ve been using AppLiku to host a Django service since over a year and it&#x27;s a great alternative to Heroku if one is bogged down by the limitations. Kudos to the maker!

django admin &gt; database console.<p>Even though the admin is far from perfect it is a fantastic alternative to having operations people have to contend wit a database control panel.