Before installing django-admin-tools, you’ll need to have a copy of Django already installed. For the 0.2 release, Django 1.1 or newer is required.
django-admin-tools requires Django version 1.1 or superior, optionally, if you want to display feed modules, you’ll also need the Universal Feed Parser module.
There are several ways to install django-admin-tools, this is explained in the installation section.
For the impatient, the easiest method is to install django-admin-tools via easy_install or pip.
Using easy_install, type:
easy_install -Z django-admin-tools
Note that the -Z flag is required, to tell easy_install not to create a zipped package; zipped packages prevent certain features of Django from working properly.
Using pip, type:
pip install django-admin-tools
For a more detailed guide on how to configure django-admin-tools, please consult the configuration section.
In order to use django-admin-tools you obviously need to have configured your Django admin site. If you didn’t, please refer to the relevant Django documentation.
Important
It is required that you use the Django 1.1 syntax to declare the Django admin urls, e.g.:
urlpatterns = patterns('',
(r'^admin/', include(admin.site.urls)),
)
The old url style (r'^admin/(.*)', admin.site.root) won’t work.
First make sure you have the following template context processors installed:
TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS = (
'django.core.context_processors.auth',
'django.core.context_processors.request',
)
Then, add admin_tools and its modules to the INSTALLED_APPS like this:
INSTALLED_APPS = (
'admin_tools',
'admin_tools.theming',
'admin_tools.menu',
'admin_tools.dashboard',
'django.contrib.auth',
'django.contrib.sites',
'django.contrib.admin'
# ...other installed applications...
)
Important
it is very important that you put the admin_tools modules before the django.contrib.admin module, because django-admin-tools overrides the default Django admin templates, and this will not work otherwise.
django-admin-tools is modular, so if you want to disable a particular module, just remove or comment it out in your INSTALLED_APPS, note that admin_tools is required for i18n.
To set up the tables that django-admin-tools uses you’ll need to type:
python manage.py syncdb
You’ll need to add django-admin-tools to your urls.py file:
urlpatterns = patterns('',
url(r'^admin_tools/', include('admin_tools.urls')),
#...other url patterns...
)
To do this you have two options:
create a symbolic link to the django-admin-tools media files to your MEDIA_ROOT directory, for example:
ln -s /usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/admin_tools/media/admin_tools /path/to/yourproject/media/
copy the django-admin-tools media files to your MEDIA_ROOT directory, for example:
cp -r /usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/admin_tools/media/admin_tools /path/to/yourproject/media/
Congrats! At this point you should have a working installation of django-admin-tools. Now you can just login to your admin site and see what changed.
django-admin-tools is fully customizable, but this is out of the scope of this quickstart. To learn how to customize django-admin-tools modules please read the customization section.