Improved Django Admin theming

The default Admin Dashboard is basic. I have a few Django sites for my own purposes. For a long time I just manually marked up my content in HTML and entered it into TextField boxes because that was easy for me. But more recently I explored and implemented a WYSIWYG (CKEditor) to prepare to distribute a Django project for my friends to use. Since they are non-technical, they might not have experience with HTML and asking them to markup their essays in HTML is not a fair ask, hence why I am now using CKEditor.

That is one step to make the Django Admin Dashboard more user friendly.

In my next step in this effort, rather than Django’s default sparse and barren UI, I am trying to find a theme to make Django appear “friendly” and more “gentle” and relatable (almost like WordPress).

There are lots of feature-rich and enhanced custom Django Admin dashboard themes available for a fee (usually costing $100 or more). They come with analytics and dazzling data panels showing “conversion rates” typically because these freelance support sites are designed for small business owners who need insight into their sales and marketing campaigns. But that isn’t my use case. The Django project I am working on now is a rudimentary blog for a philosophy society which we expect to have about a half dozen users posting essays / articles. There are no sales or ad referrals involved. We are expecting minimal (very low) traffic. No analytics needed. But I want to present my peers with an Admin Dashboard that isn’t as dry and boring as Django’s default. What might you people suggest?

I found an article on Medium titled: “Django Dashboards — Open Source and Free”. In that article there is a short but heavily annotated list of possibilities that are free (no cost), are open source, and the themes are available on GitHub. But as you can see in their screenshots (some even have live demos if you want to test yourself), all of them collect and present website data with categories such as “Customer Base”, “Demographics”, Bounce rate”, “Revenue Generated” along with many other metrics that are simply not applicable to the low traffic philosophy blog I am baking.

The bottom line: I’m looking for a nice modern responsive (perhaps Bootstrap based) UI theme for the Admin Dashboard which is polished, smooth, and refined that is easy on the eyes for non-technical philosophers posting blog content. What suggestions or ideas could you people recommend?

Had you take a look on jazzmin?

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