Introduction

Let's say we want to customize the front page of a large organization's admin site. We want to show the health of the different systems in the organization and see any high-priority alerts that are active. If this were an internal website built on top of Django, we would need to customize it. Adding these kinds of functionalities will require the developers in the IT team to customize the default admin panel and create their own custom AdminSite module, which will render a different index page in comparison to what is provided by the default admin site. Fortunately, Django makes these kinds of customizations easy.

In this chapter, we will look at how we can leverage Django's framework and its extensibility to customize Django's default admin interface (as shown in Figure 10.1). We'll not just learn how to make the interface more personal; we will also learn how we can control the different aspects of the admin site to make Django load a custom...