[Nagyman]

We use Grappelli. It's a nice facelift and adds extra admin functionality too. Unfortunately, the entire django admin is due for a bit of an overhaul (more talk than action at this point I believe). It implemented a pseudo-class based view before they were a thing, and just changing the admin app to use the standard CBVs would be a big win.

Kudos and credit to the authors of the original admin application – there's a hook for almost anything making it incredibly flexible. My major gripe has been template overriding (lot's of copy-pasting entire templates just to add a new block); but at least it's possible.

[andybak]

The main reason I've been forced to copy and paste large parts of admin templates is the fact that you can't partially override admin templates in the most obvious way due to the template loader getting stuck in an infinite loop.

If that's your problem then take a look at: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/django-apptemplates