Apart from the usual admin, I want to create a limited admin for non-staff users. This admin site will have different registered ModelAdmins.

I created a folder /useradmin/ in my project directory and similar to contrib/admin/_init_.py I added an autodiscover() which will register models defined in useradmin.py modules instead of admin.py:

# useradmin/__init__.py
def autodiscover():
# Same as admin.autodiscover() but registers useradmin.py modules
...
for app in settings.INSTALLED_APPS:
    mod = import_module(app)
    try:
        before_import_registry = copy.copy(site._registry)
        import_module('%s.useradmin' % app)
    except:
        site._registry = before_import_registry
        if module_has_submodule(mod, 'useradmin'):
            raise

I also cretated sites.py under useradmin/ to override AdminSite similar to contrib/admin/sites:

# useradmin/sites.py
class UserAdminSite(AdminSite):
    def has_permission(self, request):
        # Don't care if the user is staff
        return request.user.is_active

    def login(self, request):
        # Do the login stuff but don't care if the user is staff
        if request.user.is_authenticated():
            ...
        else:
            ...

site = UserAdminSite(name='useradmin')

In the project's URLs:

# urls.py
from django.contrib import admin
import useradmin

admin.autodiscover()
useradmin.autodiscover()

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    (r'^admin/', include(admin.site.urls)),
    (r'^useradmin/', include(useradmin.site.urls)),
)

And I try to register different models in admin.py and useradmin.py modules under app directories:

# products/useradmin.py
import useradmin
class ProductAdmin(useradmin.ModelAdmin):
    pass
useradmin.site.register(Product, ProductAdmin)

But when registering models in useradmin.py like useradmin.site.register(Product, ProductAdmin), I get 'module' object has no attribute 'ModelAdmin' exception. Though when I try this via shell;

import useradmin
from useradmin import ModelAdmin

does not raise any exception.

Any ideas what might be wrong?

Edit:

I tried going the @Luke way and arranged the code as follows as minimal as possible: (file paths are relative to the project root)

# admin.py
from django.contrib.admin import autodiscover
from django.contrib.admin.sites import AdminSite
user_site = AdminSite(name='useradmin')

# urls.py (does not even have url patterns; just calls autodiscover())
import admin
admin.autodiscover()

# products/admin.py
import admin
from products.models import Product
admin.user_site.register(Product)

As a result I get an AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'user_site' when admin.user_site.register(Product) in products/admin.py is called.

Any ideas?

Solution:

I don't know if there are better ways but, renaming the admin.py in the project root to useradmin.py and updating the imports accordingly resolved the last case, which was a naming and import conflict.