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While there is a place for this, there should also be a caveat. You are essentially forking django-admin - at least all the templates for it. Someone will have to keep that synced with any changes to Django going forward.

I stuck to a much lighter 'CSS only' theming of the Django admin which is less likely to need a lot of work to track changes to Django core.

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This is correct. Unfortunately no bootstrapping can be done to the actual html code without rewriting it. Or, to be more precise, no _good_ bootstrapping can be done.

I hope this app can invite to a refactoring of the django-admin app to render themes more feasible without too much hassle.

Yep. There's definitely some architectural changes to the admin that would aid in re-theming.

More functionality encapsulated in template tags or the use of class-based views to facilitate reuse. Or even split the Admin into an API and an replaceable front-end. (a front-end to the back-end if you get my drift).

Lots of the admin would be nice to reuse for non-admin CRUD apps. Actions, list-filters, changelist, hierarchical date stuff, inlines...

In many ways the admin code is amazingly malleable and open to reuse in many areas. It's just that it's rather inconsistent and some other areas are extremely hard to reuse. Woe betide you if the thing you want to customize is in the latter category.

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