Django - project templates

Posted under » Django on 7 May 2021

Create a templates directory in your project directory (the one that contains manage.py).

Open your settings file (mysite/settings.py, remember) and add a DIRS option in the TEMPLATES setting:

 'DIRS': [BASE_DIR / 'templates'],

Now create a directory called admin inside templates, and copy the template admin/base_site.html from within the default Django admin template directory in the source code of Django itself (django/contrib/admin/templates) into that directory.

{% block branding %}
<h1 id="site-name"><a href="{% url 'admin:index' %}">Polls Administration</a></h1>
{% endblock %}

We use this approach to teach you how to override templates. In an actual project, you would probably use the django.contrib.admin.AdminSite.site_header attribute to more easily make this particular customization.

Note that any of Django’s default admin templates can be overridden. To override a template, do the same thing you did with base_site.html – copy it from the default directory into your custom directory, and make changes.

On a similar note, you might want to customize the look and feel of the Django admin index page.

By default, it displays all the apps in INSTALLED_APPS that have been registered with the admin application, in alphabetical order. You may want to make significant changes to the layout. After all, the index is probably the most important page of the admin, and it should be easy to use.

The template to customize is admin/index.html. (Do the same as with admin/base_site.html in the previous section – copy it from the default directory to your custom template directory). Edit the file, and you’ll see it uses a template variable called app_list. That variable contains every installed Django app. Instead of using that, you can hard-code links to object-specific admin pages in whatever way you think is best.