The goal of this package is to make some of the functionality of contrib.admin available outside of the admin site.

Tested with Django 1.11 and 2.0.2

• Customization that is impossible or too complex in the admin.
• Making admin listing or change form available to non-staff users.
• Making an alternative admin listing with different columns or other elements, e.g. a simpler more compact listing for some use cases while a full admin listing is still available in the admin.
• Making admin listing available to users who do not have the change permissions for the respective model.
• Custom / explicit permissioning for each view.
• Making unlimited ChangeList pages / views with different configurations for the same model, e.g. each with different columns, filters and actions, set up for different types of users, for example a simplified listing with 2-3 columns for reviewers or other non-technical users, more columns or actions for users who may need to do more extensive changes.

• Sorting, filtering, pagination, search and actions.
• Declaration of columns using the same attribute (list_display) as in the admin.
• Add, change, and delete confirmation forms with the same actions as in the admin.

• The Admin can look up and create related records, since it usually has all of the models loaded and managed in the admin site. Admin Unchained package is not meant and would not make much sense for this use-case so it currently doesn't support it.

• Add inlines to change / add views.
• Add history view.

For example, if we have a model Book as shown:

class Book(models.Model):
    authors = models.ManyToManyField(Author)
    title = models.CharField(max_length=150)
    published = models.DateField()
    num_pages = models.IntegerField()
    out_of_print = models.BooleanField(default=False)

In our views, we'll first import the admin and base views:

from admin_unchained.admin import AUAdmin
from admin_unchained.views import AUListView, AUAddOrChangeView, AUDeleteView

Then we'll inherit from the AUAdmin and set it up:

class BookAdmin(AUAdmin):
    model = Book
    list_display = ('pk', 'title', 'published')
    search_fields = ('title', 'authors__last_name')
    list_filter = ('published', 'authors')
    actions_on_top = True
    list_per_page = 20
    raw_id_fields = ()

    # add_url_name = 'book_add'
    # change_url_name = 'book_change'
    # actions = (make_published,)

Making an admin-like listing is as simple as inheriting from AUListView:

class BookListView(AUListView):
    model = Book
    admin_class = BookAdmin

You can now add a url for it to your urls:

url(r'^$', views.BookListView.as_view(), name='books'),

If you need add, change and delete views, you can add them as follows:

class BookAddOrChangeView(AUAddOrChangeView):
    model = Book
    admin_class = BookAdmin
    success_url = reverse_lazy('books')
    delete_url_name = 'book_delete'

class BookDeleteView(AUDeleteView):
    model = Book
    admin_class = BookAdmin
    success_url = reverse_lazy('books')

To link them to the listing admin, you can uncomment the commented lines above in the admin setup, and add the following to your urls file:

url(r'^(?P<pk>.+)/change/$',
    views.BookAddOrChangeView.as_view(),
    name='book_change'),
url(r'^(?P<pk>.+)/delete/$',
    views.BookDeleteView.as_view(),
    name='book_delete'),
url(r'^add/$',
    views.BookAddOrChangeView.as_view(),
    name='book_add'),

Finally, you can uncomment the actions line in the admin setup and add an action function somewhere before the admin class:

def make_published(modeladmin, request, queryset):
    print ('In make_published()', queryset)
make_published.short_description = 'Set books as published'

You can look under example_app to see the example admin, views and urls.