Custom app names in the django admin

EDIT: This approach is flawed - it will never work in the app_index page (/admin/appname/) and can cause problems with contenttypes queries. You are better off overriding the admin templates (lots of them unfortunately). To avoid hardcoding the app_label in the templates wrap it in trans tags and use the internationalization framework to map the internal name to your desired display name.

EDIT 2: You can also use this.

Suppose you have a model like this:

class Stuff(models.Model):
    class Meta:
        verbose_name = u'The stuff'
        verbose_name_plural = u'The bunch of stuff'

    ...

You have verbose_name, however you want to customise app_label too for different display in admin. Unfortunatelly having some arbitrary string (with spaces) doesn't work and it's not for display anyway.

Turns out that the admin uses app_label. title () for display so we can make a little hack: str subclass with overriden title method:

class string_with_title(str):
    def __new__(cls, value, title):
        instance = str.__new__(cls, value)
        instance._title = title
        return instance

    def title(self):
        return self._title

    __copy__ = lambda self: self
    __deepcopy__ = lambda self, memodict: self

Now we can have the model like this:

class Stuff(models.Model):
    class Meta:
        app_label = string_with_title("stuffapp", "The stuff box")
        # 'stuffapp' is the name of the django app
        verbose_name = 'The stuff'
        verbose_name_plural = 'The bunch of stuff'

    ...

and the admin will show "The stuff box" as the app name.