I was a happy developer using django-suit for all my working projects. Now django-suit v1 is becoming a bit oldie, it is based on bootstrap 2.3, and rewrites so many templates that its compatibility with some other apps begins to suffer (i.e. django-filer). It's a shame, it was in my opinion the best admin app overthere.

I know django-suit v2 is on stage, at the moment of this writing it is in development, and I'm quite sure it'will be a great app, based on bootstrap 4. I tested it some month ago', but I ended up frustrated because of the continuos changes that made it impossible for me to use it in production. Django Suit provides many tools, it offers so much, but for many projects I didn't need all the stuff. For example I never used its custom widgets, I like django-ckeditor package as html editor, I rarely use sortables because an integer field can do the job and it is faster and so on...

So the point is that I began as a joke to develop a custom admin app for django, which is suited on my habits, on my way to program the admin site of my applications. The result is django-baton.

I share with darklow, the idea to overwrite the few templates as possible, and rely on css and dom manipulation (when needed)

I began with the "mobile first" approach, so django-baton is really fully responsive. Ok, ok, there are some components which are tricky to use on mobile devices, and tables are responsive in the sense that the container has an overflow auto property. But django-baton is usable from your smartphone, and looks cool.

Django Baton provides the two more appreciated features that django-suit offered to me:

• a custom sidebar menu;
• form tabs

The menu django-baton provides is highly customizable: you can define 4 kind of voices: title, app, model, and free.
Form tabs are just... tabs. But they help to keep forms and inlines clean.

Django Baton also provides a cool index page made of google analytics widgets displaying statistics for any linked view.

Last but not least, django-baton is heavily customizable. All the js and css stuff is compiled with webpack and babel loaders. So you can just change the appeareance of the admin changing some sass variables, re-compile the js application and serve the bundle from an app listed before baton in the INSTALLED_APPS.

All this and much more is explained in depth in the repository page and in the documentation site.

I really hope someone of you will use django-baton for some projects, in order to receive feedbacks, to have issues tracked down. With your help I will be able to release a stable 0.1.0 release sooner!

Oh, I forgot, django-baton comes with MIT license.

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