Ordering admin.ModelAdmin objects in Django Admin

Question

Let's say I have my pizza application with Topping and Pizza classes and they show in Django Admin like this:

PizzaApp
-
Toppings      >>>>>>>>>>      Add / Change

Pizzas        >>>>>>>>>>      Add / Change

But I want them like this:

PizzaApp
-
Pizzas        >>>>>>>>>>      Add / Change

Toppings      >>>>>>>>>>      Add / Change

How do I configure that in my admin.py?

Answer 1

This is just a wild stab in the dark, but is there any chance that the order in which you call admin.site.register(< Model class >, < ModelAdmin class >) can determine the display order? Actually, I doubt that would work because I believe Django maintains a registry of the Model -> ModelAdmin objects implemented as a standard Python dictionary, which does not maintain iteration ordering.

If that doesn't behave the way you want, you can always play around with the source in django/contrib/admin. If you need the iteration order maintained, you could replace the _registry object in the AdminSite class (in admin/sites.py) with a UserDict or DictMixin that maintains insertion order for the keys. (But please take this advice with a grain of salt, since I've never made these kinds of changes myself and I'm only making an educated guess at how Django iterates over the collection of ModelAdmin objects. I do think that django/contrib/admin/sites.py is the place to look for this code, though, and the AdminSite class and register() and index() methods in particular are what you want.)

Obviously the nicest thing here would be a simple option for you to specify in your own /admin.py module. I'm sure that's the kind of answer you were hoping to receive. I'm not sure if those options exist, though.

Answer 2

I added it to Django's trac:

http://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/9928

Answer 3

This is actually covered at the very bottom of Part 2 of the Django Tutorial.

Here's the relevant section:

Customize the admin index page

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.

Answer 4

My solution was to make subclasses of django.contrib.admin.sites.AdminSite and django.contrib.admin.options.ModelAdmin .

I did this so I could display a more descriptive title for each app and order the appearance of models in each app. So I have a dict in my settings.py that maps app_labels to descriptive names and the order in which they should appear, the models are ordered by an ordinal field I provide in each ModelAdmin when I register them with the admin site.

Although making your own subclasses of AdminSite and ModelAdmin is encouraged in the docs, my solution looks like an ugly hack in the end.