Django Control Room 1.8.1 adds support for creating panels that live entirely in a Django project. While creating panels has always been possible, all existing guides and templates have focused on creating pip installable packages meant to be broadly shared. Internal panels are meant for projects that need to create their own bespoke tools (e.g. a customer CRM tool, billing system tools, workflow engines, etc.) Creating internal tools will always be needed at companies; projects using Django Control Room can now do this more quickly than ever by standing up their tools inside the already excellent Django Admin.

Checkout the new internal panel guide for a more in depth introduction on how to create an internal panel.

Changes:

• New panel creation command: Creating an internal panel is as easy as creating a standard Django app. A new command dcr_startpanel has been included in this release to make this process easy. Simply run: python manage.py dcr_startpanel customer_crm and a new Django app (called dcr_customer_crm) representing a panel will be created in your apps folder. Simply add this new app to your INSTALLED_APPS and urls.py like any other app to see your app in the Django Admin or the DCR hub.

• Internal Panels Section: A panel that lives inside this Django project, rather than a published package, shows up under a new Internal Panels section inside the DCR hub. There are now three different categories for panels:

  • Official panels: these include panels released as part of the DCR org (e.g. dj-redis-panel, dj-cache-panel, etc.)
  • Community panels: Any non-official published panels that are pip installable.
  • Internal panels: panels that are part of the project's source directly.

• MCP and custom user models: MCP_USERNAME was looked up with a hardcoded username field. Projects whose user model uses another identifier, such as email, raised an unhandled error instead of a configuration error. Lookup now uses the model's USERNAME_FIELD. With the default user model, behavior is unchanged. Set MCP_USERNAME to the value of that field (the email address, for an email-as-identifier user). Thanks to Jingran for the fix in #39.

The full changelog is in the 1.8.0 release.

You can update DCR and all of its official panels by running:

pip install --upgrade "dj-control-room[all]"

Independent creators have started publishing video coverage of Django Control Room, which is useful if you'd rather watch a walkthrough than read through docs.

• Cloud With Django published a setup walkthrough covering installation into an existing project, registering panels, and configuring access from scratch.

• BugBytes has published two videos so far: a tour of the Redis, Cache, and Celery panels, and a separate video playing through dj-doom-panel once that shipped.

Community support for DCR is picking up and it's facinating to see people use and make content about it. If you've made something about DCR and want to share, check out the community page for more details.

This release significantly expands theme compatibility for DCR to many more alternative admin packages used in the Django ecosystem.

• Automatic theme switching: There is no longer any need to explicitly load any adapter css; If you are using a different admin (e.g. unfold, or jazzmin) The appropriate theme adapter will be loaded automatically if it exists and for all panels. You can always turn this feature off and control exactly what css or adapters are loaded.

• New theme adapter for django-admin-interface: This is a popular alternative admin package that lets you switch themes at run time by virtue of theme data being persisted in the database. It also provides a mechanism for you to build your own custom themes and comes with several examples. DCR now supports themes created by this package.

• New theme adapter for Dracula: The popular color theme for code editors and other places has a django admin theme dedicated to it. This is a very light color scheme for the admin that I think more people should try. DCR now supports it via a direct theme adapter.

• Generic theme adapters: While larger footprint packages (unfold, jazzmin, etc) have dedicated theme adapters built for them, this is not a scalable strategy given how many possible admin packages may exist. General theme adapters have now been built that are loaded for many different packages. This allows DCR to work for many more packages than the themes and packages given first party support. You can see a full compatibility matrix here

This release marks the completion of a wave of changes aimed at allowing DCR to function in most admin environments. It's also the end of a series of migrations for existing panels toward using a common core library that normalizes how panels operate (giving them all theme abilities for example)

You can update DCR and all of its official panels by running:

pip install --upgrade "dj-control-room[all]"

Django Control Room 1.6.0 has been released and continues panel migrations and adding theme compatibility support.

• New Theme Adapter for Django Grappelli: The theme detection layer added in earlier releases now recognizes Grappelli specifically and swaps in matching breadcrumb and button classes instead of falling back to generic styling. Grappelli has been around since about 2010 (probably earlier) and has impressively remained current all this time. Among alternative admins, It has been a pillar of the ecosystem and currently has many active users still. Supporting it is an important milestone for DCR.

• Core Migration: This release is accompanied by dj-celery-panel 0.5.0 which migrates the celery panel to the shared framework provided by dj-control-room-base. As a result, Celery panel now enjoys a new look and also works across alternate admins as well

Next up:

Theme compatibility support and panel migrations will be wrapping up within the next release (likely in about one week). Most of the most widely used Django admin themes and replacements are now supported; Even packages that don't have official support have also been tested and work fine. If you are using something that you would want some official support for, please open a ticket for it.

I think the most widely used admin replacements/themes are now supported; Even ones that don't have official support yet seem to work well. If you are using something that you would want some official support for, please open a ticket for it on the main DCR repo

You can update DCR and all of its official panels by running:

pip install --upgrade "dj-control-room[all]"

Django Control Room 1.5.0 is out, along with several updates across the DCR ecosystem.

• Theme Compatibility: Continuing the work that brought support for admin themes like Django Unfold, this release adds support for Django Jazzmin. Jazzmin is an important package in the django community, with multiple projects using it and over half a million downloads per month attributed to it. With this release, projects using Jazzmin can now enjoy first party support for using DCR and Jazzmin together.

• Core Migration: Also notable, dj-urls-panel 0.4.0 has now been migrated to the core libraries provided by dj-control-room-base, bringing it onto DCR's common plugin architecture and adding both Jazzmin support and new MCP tools for agents. The URL panel has been migrated to the core libraries in dj-control-room-base. Along with Jazzmin support, the migration adds a new set of MCP tools for URL introspection:

  • list_urls: search and explore registered URLs
  • get_url_detail: retrieve deeper metadata, including serializer information
  • inspect_view: inspect view source code

The migration work continues, with four panels remaining. dj-celery-panel will likely be next to be updated.

You can update DCR and all of its official panels by running:

pip install --upgrade "dj-control-room[all]"

A large update with many upgrades has just been released across the Django Control Room ecosystem.

The two biggest additions are support for alternate Django admin themes and the introduction of MCP tooling throughout the platform.

• Theme Adapters: with dj-control-room-base 1.1.0 A new theme adapter system has been added to the core library. The first built-in adapter provides support for django-unfold, allowing any panel built on dj-control-room-base to optionally adopt Unfold's color scheme and styling. Support for additional admin themes will be added over time.

• Django Control Room: The Django Control Room hub has also been updated to use the shared core package, bringing the new theme adapter system and django-unfold support to the main application.

• MCP Support: Panels can now expose MCP tools, and Django Control Room itself can expose an MCP endpoint that can be enabled for your project. The first implementation ships with dj-signals-panel==0.3.0, which includes MCP tools for signal inspection:

  • list_signals
  • list_receivers
  • find_signal_by_sender
  • inspect_receiver (source code retrieval)

These tools expose the same operational information previously available to humans through the Django admin, but now make it accessible to AI agents as well. They can answer questions such as:

• How many signals in my project have at least one receiver?
• Is this receiver actually being registered?
• Why isn't my receiver firing?
• Show me the implementation of this receiver.

What's Next

Four additional panels will be migrated to dj-control-room-base over the coming weeks. This shared foundation allows the entire ecosystem to benefit from common UI integrations, theme adapters, and future platform capabilities without each panel having to implement them independently.

The MCP story is also just getting started. You can expect additional MCP tools across the remaining panels, further work around authentication and authorization, and significantly expanded documentation. The long-term goal is to provide everything needed to build admin-native operational tooling for Django, whether those tools are used by humans or AI agents.

you can update DCR and all of its official panels by running:

pip install --upgrade "dj-control-room[all]"