Making it easier to customize Django Admin

[Frank Wiles]

I wrote django-admin-views recently (​https://github.com/frankwiles/django-admin-views) based on suggestions from Julien Phalip and Jacob Kaplan-Moss they would like to see this be included into the admin.

Specifically I would like to add the following abilities:

1) Easily link up custom admin views to admin:index

2) Include reverse()-able links and off site URLs to admin:index on a per app basis (i.e. defined by the app's admin.py)

3) Include blocks in admin:index to customize the displaying of each app block

4) Ability to define the sort order of the apps manually. Give the user full control or if they just define 2 of 10 apps put the defined 2 at the top in their order and alphabetize the remaining apps to ensure no apps are missing due to not including them in this setting. Would obviously continue to default to alphabetical by app name.

I'm willing to do the work on this and Julien has offered to help mentor/work me through the process.

[Jannis Leidel]

Accepting this in general since I've also had those problems and used django-admin-tools to solve it. I like the simplistic proposals you made to extend the ModelAdmin.

But, I think at least 3 and 4 are separate issues that should have their own ticket as they can easily be implemented without waiting for the "custom view" feature to be implemented. I'm not entirely happy about introducing yet another name next to AdminSite and ModelAdmin/InlineModelAdmin and would suggest to add the features to ModelAdmin directly.