Customize django admin templates

Quite often, we need to customize the django admin template: to add additional functionality or just change its look and feel.

Recently, I had the task of adding an ajax request on admin page load(specifically, change_form.html) and adding two buttons, one of which would bring a modal up and the other would delete the selected items which, in their turn, were brought by that ajax request.

Here is what I did and went through:

Template

First, I created a change_form.html file in /templates/admin/ folder. As I wanted this file to extend, not replace, the default change_form.html, I wrote this at the beginning of the file:

{% extends 'admin/change_form.html' %}

This, naturally, led to maximum recursin depth exceeded error as it was trying to extend itself.

Then, I read somewhere that I could put this file in /templates/admin/app_name folder, so that it will change the templates of only this app. Voila! Recursion problem solved.

Then, I added all those buttons and modals I wanted to(more on this later). Everything was working fine until I found out that the buttons I added appear on the admin pages of all the models in the app. But I wanted them to appear only on the admin pages of, let's say, product model.

Turned out, the same works here. I just needed to put the file inside /templates/admin/app_name/model_name. In my case, it the file was /templates/admin/enterprise/product.

Styles, Scripts and Buttons

Where do I put them? Taking a look at admin/base.html did the trick. It has special blocks for extra styles and scripts. So I put my css and javascript files in the following way:

{% block extrastyle %}
    {{ block.super }}

    <link rel="stylesheet" href="{% static 'css/enterprise/main.css'%}">
{% endblock %}

{% block extrahead %}
    {{ block.super }}

    <script type="text/javascript" src="{% static 'js/enterprise/modal.js'%}"></script>
{% endblock %}

As for buttons, I thought a good place would be above the default buttons. So, I thought out the block of those buttons and put mine right above them:

{% block submit_buttons_bottom %}
    <div class="submit-row">
        <button class="btn btn-danger">Custom Button</button>
    </div>

    {{ block.super }}
{% endblock %}

As I was using django-admin-bootstrapped, submit-row gave the div nice and natural look.

Additional

In the ajax request, I had to send the id of the product being changed. So I thought I could get it with {{ product.id }} but I was wrong. Then, I learned that I could get it like so:

{{ original.id }}

So, the model instance being dealt with can be accessed with the word original. How original, isn't it?

Wrap up

Either I am bad at reading the documentation or it could be improved a little further. Probably first option.

I hope it will help somebody save some time in the future.

Fight on!