Alter Django admin change list title text

Question

I am creating some custom views for the Django admin interface that use the standard change-list as an interim stage. This works fine, apart from the fact the change-list page H1 is 'Select object to change'. 'Change' is not the right verb for the action the user will be undertaking in my custom views.

I have found the django.contrib.admin templates that control the layout of the change-list pages (change_list.html and change_list_results.html) but I cannot find where the title is supplied from. I'm guessing it is a variable passed in by a view someplace?

How can I override this text with something less misleading e.g. 'Select object' instead of 'Select object to change'? I'm OK with changing it across all the change-list views, not just the particular ones I'm trying to customise; but I'd prefer a solution that is an override as opposed to a modification of the django.contrib.admin code if possible.

Update: I have found the view responsible for the change list, it's main.py in django\contrib\admin\views. The variable is self.title on line 69 (Django 1.0). I have acheived the result I am looking for by editing this line

self.title = (self.is_popup and ugettext('Select %s') % force_unicode(self.opts.verbose_name) or ugettext('Select %s to change') % force_unicode(self.opts.verbose_name))

to read

self.title = (self.is_popup and ugettext('Select %s') % force_unicode(self.opts.verbose_name) or ugettext('Select %s') % force_unicode(self.opts.verbose_name))

I'd still be really interested to hear a better way of achieving the same result that doesn't involve hacking the django.contrib.admin code - it looks like there already is an option to have the title the way I'd like it, but I'm not sure how to trigger that?

Answer 1

Not sure if still relevant, but another way to do this would be passing the extra_content for the changelist_view method. For ex:

from django.contrib import admin

class MyCustomAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):

    def changelist_view(self, request, extra_context=None):
        extra_context = {'title': 'Change this for a custom title.'}
        return super(MyCustomAdmin, self).changelist_view(request, extra_context=extra_context)

Answer 2

For current versions of Django:

class CustomChangeList(django.contrib.admin.views.main.ChangeList):
    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        super().__init__(*args, **kwargs)
        self.title = 'My Cool Title'

class MyAdmin(ModelAdmin):
    def get_changelist(self, request, **kwargs):
        return CustomChangeList

Answer 3

There is already ticket for ChangeList customization: http://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/9749. This will give the ability to change many additional aspects of admin application. Unfortunately there is no clean way to achieve your goals.