Django's admin supports a lot of customization. However, the current implementation relies on the use of class value and methods, requiring a lot of code duplication. This project contains classes, mixins, and a few templates that improve the usability and maintainability of Django's admin.

ModelAdmin mixins:

• ReadonlyModelAdmin - Removes all editability from the ModelAdmin.
• CSVModelAdmin - Adds a changelist action to export the selected records as a CSV.
• FormatterModelAdmin - Allows the use of admin field formatters.
• BetterRawIdFieldsModelAdmin - Adapted from a Django Snippet, this formats all raw id fields with a convenient link to that record's corresponding admin change page.

Field formatters:

If you want to format a monetary dollar value with a dollar sign and commas, you have to implement a myvariable_dollars() method in your ModelAdmin class that returns the desired string, and then list this method in the ModelAdmin's readonly_fields list.

In many non-trivial applications, I found myself writing a huge number of these functions, most of which were nearly identical. So I decided to abstract this functionality into a number of classes that could be instantiated and easily plugged into a ModelAdmin.

Pre-built formatters include:

• DollarFormat
• PercentFormat
• CenterFormat
• NbspFormat
• BooleanFormat
• ForeignKeyLink
• OneToManyLink

Formatters are used by wrapping them around field names in a ModelAdmin. Say you have a model with a field called income that you want to display in admin formatted with a dollar sign. Normally, you'd do something like this:

class BudgetAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):

    fields = (
        'id',
        'name',
        'income_str',
    )

    readonly_fields = (
        'income_str',
    )

    def income_str(self, request, obj=None):
        if obj is None:
            return
        return '$%.2f' % obj.income

Formatters simply this process. In this example, you could use the DollarFormat class to accomplish the same thing with much less code:

from admin_steroids import FormatterModelAdmin
from admin_steroids.formatters import DollarFormat

class BudgetAdmin(FormatterModelAdmin):

    fields = (
        'id',
        'name',
        DollarFormat('income', decimals=2),
    )

Install the package via pip with:

pip install https://github.com/chrisspen/django-admin-steroids