Customizing the Django admin panel

The Django admin panel is a powerful built-in feature of Django that automatically generates a user-friendly interface to manage our application’s data models. This is a great feature of Django that many other frameworks don’t offer.

Figure 7.3 shows the current movies admin page.

Figure 7.3 – The movies admin page

The admin panel may seem very rigid, but fortunately, Django allows us to customize it according to our needs. Let’s apply two customizations to the movies admin page – first, ordering movies by name, and second, allowing searches by name.

Ordering movies by name

In /movies/admin.py, add the following in bold:

from django.contrib import admin
from .models import Movie
class MovieAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    ordering = ['name']
admin.site.register(Movie, MovieAdmin)

Let’s explain the previous code:

• We created a MovieAdmin...