Adding Custom Views and Templates to Django Admin

The Django admin feature is great for quickly spinning up basic CRUD actions without giving someone direct database access, but gives you very little control over the feature set or content. This is perfect for quickly spinning up the ability to create or update rows in the database, but sometimes you need just a little more.

In my case, I was creating a template for a PDF that I wanted to be preview-able directly from the admin page where the template was created, so people could see what the result would be of the object they’d just created…