One of Django's best assets is its extensive and very good documentation. However, there are few cases where the documentation is lacking or totally missing. Customizing the automatic admin interface is one of these cases.

In the official Django documentation there are FAQs titled How can I customize the functionality of the admin interface? and The dynamically-generated admin site is ugly! How can I change it?. What they explain, in a nutshell, is that you can use custom JavaScript to add functionality, and modify the CSS to customize how the admin looks. Latter also points to a new documentation page titled Customizing the Django admin interface. All these pages fail to mention, however, that you can customize the templates too.

Even the Django tutorial mentions the possibility of overriding the basic admin templates — just like you can do with any other app. But modifying a template admin-wide is not always enough. Wouldn't it be great to override templates per-app basis, just like with generic views? Well, turns out you can do exactly that.

The change_list.html and change_form.html templates can be overridden on per app and per object basis. That means that you can customize a template for not only for a specific app, but for a specific model, too. This is very handy!

To override a template with your own, copy the original to your templates directory in one of these locations:

admin/<app_label>/<object_name>/change_form.html
admin/<app_label>/change_form.html
admin/change_form.html

The admin templates have also very flexible blocks built in so you can just extend the original template and override just the blocks you want if you don't want to write the whole template yourself. This way you can keep the custom template code very nice and clean.

With custom templatetags and custom templates, the possibilities of customizing the Django admin interface are endless. That said, it's also good to remember that the automatic admin is not perfect for everything. If you feel that it doesn't quite cut it, just write your own admin views. With the newforms-library that they are cooking at the Django HQ, it's not only easy, but truly fun.

Further reading

NewAdminChanges - A wiki page that explains some of the functionality in the admin app
/trunk/django/contrib/admin - The best way of learning things is to look inside. Browse trough the admin app code — just to see that its really just an ordinary (well, not really) Django app.