Hacking Django
The one thing I like most about the Django framework is that it is notoriously easy to hack.
I was looking for a way to add a custom landing page for Django Admin. As usual, I started with the documentation. Django provides a way to add a custom index page for the admin site. But using that setting will destroy the default index page of Django admin.
The next step was to look into the code. I was looking for a configurable setting through which I could redirect the user to my custom landing page instead of the Django admin’s index page.
Failing to find a neat way to patch the code, I fallback to the basic OOPs
concept. I was going to override the default index view of Django’s AdminSite
class.
This is the code that I end up writing:
def django_index(self, request, extra_context=None):
return super().index(request, extra_context)
def index(self, request, extra_context=None):
return render(request, 'landing_page.html')
The above code does not do anything interesting, but I am sure that other
developers will find it stupid. It calls the index method of the base class
from another method and overrides the index method in the derived AdminSite
class.