I’m working on a Django project, and I’ve created some custom admin views using the get_urls override method described in the documentation. It works perfectly. There is just one problem. There is no way to get to this custom admin view unless you already know the URL.
There are some ways I already know of to add a link to this view somewhere in the admin, but none of them are satisfactory. I want a link to the custom view to appear in the model listings right with all the model admins. I just don’t want it to have +add or +change links next to it because it isn’t a model.
I could just override the admin_site or the template, but this is no good. It puts the customization on the project level instead of the app level. It also will only put the link on the /admin/ page and not the /admin/myapp/ page.
I could also just easily add the link in a different location by overriding the app_index.html template, but that is not exactly a convenient or intuitive place to look for it.
Another solution I came up with is to create a blank model and register a blank admin for it. Then steal the url patterns for that model so clicking on its entry goes to my custom view instead of to a blank add/change view. That works, but it’s an incredibly ugly hack.
Here is a picture of what I’m trying to achieve.
I still think the correct way of doing this is overwriting some parts of django admin templates. There is no easy way of adding these links.
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/contrib/admin/#overriding-vs-replacing-an-admin-template
I also found this article http://coffeeonthekeyboard.com/o-hai-django-adminplus-568/ which also suggests that django-adminplus is a good tool for doing this. Personally I prefer to keep clear of any extra dependancies and would still use templates – but thats up to you.