How to override Django admin's views?

Question

I want to add an upload button to the default Django admin, as shown below:

Answer 1

The index view is on the AdminSite instance. To override it, you'll have to create a custom AdminSite subclass (i.e., not using django.contrib.admin.site anymore):

from django.contrib.admin import AdminSite
from django.views.decorators.cache import never_cache

class MyAdminSite(AdminSite):
    @never_cache
    def index(self, request, extra_context=None):
        # do stuff

You might want to reference the original method at: https://github.com/django/django/blob/1.4.1/django/contrib/admin/sites.py

Then, you create an instance of this class, and use this instance, rather than admin.site to register your models.

admin_site = MyAdminSite()

Then, later:

from somewhere import admin_site

class MyModelAdmin(ModelAdmin):
    ...

admin_site.register(MyModel, MyModelAdmin)

You can find more detail and examples at: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/contrib/admin/#adminsite-objects