django-admin-tools is very easy to customize, you can override the admin menu, the index dashboard and the app index dashboard.
To customize the index and app index dashboards, the first step is to do the following:
python manage.py customdashboard
This will create a file named dashboard.py in your project directory. If for some reason you want another file name, you can do:
python manage.py customdashboard somefile.py
You can rename theses classes if you want but if you do so, make sure adjust the ADMIN_TOOLS_INDEX_DASHBOARD and ADMIN_TOOLS_APP_INDEX_DASHBOARD settings variables to match your class names.
Note
You could have done the above by hand, without using the customdashboard management command, but it’s simpler with it.
Now you need to tell django-admin-tools to use your custom dashboard(s). Open your settings.py file and add the following:
ADMIN_TOOLS_INDEX_DASHBOARD = 'yourproject.dashboard.CustomIndexDashboard'
ADMIN_TOOLS_APP_INDEX_DASHBOARD = 'yourproject.dashboard.CustomAppIndexDashboard'
If you only want a custom index dashboard, you would just need the first line. Obviously, you need to change “yourproject” to the real project name, if you have chosen a different file name or if you renamed the dashboard classes, you’ll also need to change the above string to reflect your modifications.
At this point the dashboards displayed in the index and the app index should be your custom dashboards, now you can read the dashboard and dashboard modules API documentation to learn how to create your custom dashboard.
Warning
The theming support is still very basic and I’m still not sure it’s a good idea, so do not rely to much on it for the moment.
This is very simple, just configure the ADMIN_TOOLS_THEMING_CSS to point to your custom css file, for example:
ADMIN_TOOLS_THEMING_CSS = 'css/theming.css'
A good start is to copy the admin_tools/media/admin_tools/css/theming.css to your custom file and to modify it to suits your needs.