admin.display with mark_safe

Question

Is there any chance I can put HTML in the <th> of change_list.html, other than going down the ugly road of overriding the admin_list template tags?

I want to style the text in the table head a little bit for viewing pleasure but it is quite tricky to access the table header in django.

I have something in mind like:

@admin.display(description = mark_safe("<b class='bg-danger'>status</b>"))
def get_status(self, obj):
    return obj.status

Answer 1

You can definitely embed HTML into the title/th for admin columns. Instead of using the admin.display decorator, try it like this:

def get_status(self, obj):
    return obj.status
get_status.short_description = mark_safe("<b class='bg-danger'>status</b>")

You can see how it works in tthe source code: https://github.com/django/django/blob/3.2.16/django/contrib/admin/options.py#L860

@staticmethod
def _get_action_description(func, name):
    return getattr(func, 'short_description', capfirst(name.replace('_', ' ')))


def _get_base_actions(self):
    """Return the list of actions, prior to any request-based filtering."""
    actions = []
    base_actions = (self.get_action(action) for action in self.actions or [])
    # get_action might have returned None, so filter any of those out.
    base_actions = [action for action in base_actions if action]
    base_action_names = {name for _, name, _ in base_actions}

    # Gather actions from the admin site first
    for (name, func) in self.admin_site.actions:
        if name in base_action_names:
            continue
            
        # RIGHT HERE IS WHERE IT CREATES THE TEXT FOR THE COLUMN TITLE/TH ELEMENT
        description = self._get_action_description(func, name)
        actions.append((func, name, description))
    # Add actions from this ModelAdmin.
    actions.extend(base_actions)
    return actions