How to add buttons to ModelAdmin Index View in Wagtail CMS

23 Jan · by Tim Kamanin · 3 min read

By default, every object in ModelAdmin's Index View of Wagtail CMS gets two buttons: Edit and Delete. What if we want to add more buttons? Is that possible in Wagtail? My answer is yes, and it's easy! Follow me!

Let's add a "View" button

Let's assume we have Product class, and for this class, we have ProductAdmin class defined in admin.py:

python

from django.contrib.admin import ModelAdmin

class ProductAdmin(ModelAdmin):
   model = Product

If we want to add more buttons to the index view we need to extend the default ButtonHelper class.

Here's how you can extend one to add a view button to it, follow my comments to get the idea:

python

from wagtail.contrib.modeladmin.helpers import ButtonHelper

class ProductButtonHelper(ButtonHelper):

    # Define classes for our button, here we can set an icon for example
    view_button_classnames = ['button-small', 'icon', 'icon-site'] 

    def view_button(self, obj):
        # Define a label for our button
        text = 'View {}'.format(self.verbose_name)
        return {
            'url': obj.get_absolute_url(), # decide where the button links to
            'label': text,
            'classname': self.finalise_classname(self.view_button_classnames),
            'title': text,
        }

    def get_buttons_for_obj(self, obj, exclude=None, classnames_add=None, classnames_exclude=None):
        """
        This function is used to gather all available buttons.
        We append our custom button to the btns list.
        """
        btns = super().get_buttons_for_obj(obj, exclude, classnames_add, classnames_exclude)
        if 'view' not in (exclude or []):
            btns.append(
                self.view_button(obj)
            )
        return btns

The last step is to add our custom ProductButtonHelper to ProductAdmin class:

python

class ProductAdmin(ProductModelAdmin):
    model = Product
    button_helper_class = ProductButtonHelper

Now go to your ProductAdmin index page, and you should now see three buttons for each object listed: Delete, Edit, and the new View Product.

Done!