Add column heading (and corresponding property) to Wagtail index view

Question

My team and I have created a section to allow our company to add landing pages. We'd like to include some additional columns to the index view of the associated model, as illustrated in this image.

I've found a few old posts (2014-ish) that indicate this wasn't possible, but I can't find anything newer that makes that claim invalid. Is it possible to do this, and if so can someone point me in the right direction?

Answer 1

You can do this with ModelAdmin for a specific model, but it won't appear in the Pages Explorer view as in your screenshot. Instead, it will appear in a new menu item on the left sidebar. I also find that Hooks is a great place to store this logic. Just be aware of how ModelAdmin differs from modeladmin. The Bakery Demo has some good examples of how this all works.

Answer 2

If you are willing to patch the view and template for the Page Explorer, you should be able to do this. My group isn't patching the Page Explorer so I don't have example code for that but our general approach is as follows:

1. We have a django app called wagtail_patches which is listed in our INSTALLED_APPS before the wagtail apps.

2. In wagtail_patches/apps.py we have:

   from django.apps import AppConfig
   
   class WagtailPatchesConfig(AppConfig):
       name = 'wagtail_patches'
       verbose_name = 'Wagtail Patches'
       ready_is_done = False
   
       def ready(self):
           """
           This function runs as soon as the app is loaded. It executes our monkey patches to various parts of Wagtail
           that change it to support our architecture of fully separated tenants.
           """
           # As suggested by the Django docs, we need to make absolutely certain that this code runs only once.
           if not self.ready_is_done:
               # The act of performing this import executes all the code in monkey_patches.
               from . import monkey_patches  
               # Unlike monkey_patches, the code of wagtail_hook_patches is in the function patch_hooks().
               from .wagtail_hook_patches import patch_hooks
               patch_hooks()
   
               self.ready_is_done = True
           else:
               print("{}.ready() executed more than once! This method's code is skipped on subsequent runs.".format(
                   self.__class__.__name__
               ))
   

3. Then in wagtail_patches/monkey_patches.py we import the module to be patched, then write a new method, and then replace the stock version with the new method. For example:

   from wagtail.admin.forms.collections import CollectionForm
   def collection_form_clean_name(self):
       if <weird custom condition>:
           raise ValidationError('some error message')
   CollectionForm.clean_name = collection_form_clean_name
   

4. Overriding templates is just like normal django template overriding, place your customized version of some file in a folder hierarchy matching it's usual position within Wagtail.