Django admin

The admin is where you schedule downtime by hand, and — more importantly — the way back in when the site is closed. /admin/ is exempt from blocking, so a countdown can never lock you out of the tool that removes it.

Look for Site shutdown countdown → Site shutdown countdowns.

Change list

Column	Notes
Site	The domain this countdown closes
Message	Banner headline
Countdown time	When the site closes
Maintenance end	When it reopens; empty means indefinite
Expired?	Boolean icon — has the window opened
Indefinite?	Boolean icon — scheduled with no end
Time remaining	Text: Not set, Expired, or e.g. 1 h 12 min 30 sec
Created at	Row creation timestamp

Filters are available on Site and Countdown time; search covers Message and Long description.

The list is a snapshot

Every computed column is evaluated when the page renders. Nothing ticks — reload to refresh the remaining time.

Add / change form

The form is grouped into three fieldsets:

Basic information — Site, Countdown time, Maintenance end. Leaving the maintenance end empty keeps the site blocked indefinitely once the countdown expires.

Messages — Short message (max 200 characters, appears in the banner and on the maintenance page) and Long description (optional paragraph, shown on the maintenance page only, with line breaks preserved).

Metadata — collapsed by default: Created at, Updated at and the read-only Time remaining.

Validation rules

SiteCountdown.clean() enforces two invariants, and the admin surfaces both as field errors:

Rule	Message
countdown_time must be in the future	Countdown time cannot be in the past. Pick a future date.
maintenance_until must be later than countdown_time	Maintenance end must be later than the countdown time.

You cannot edit a countdown once it has expired

The first rule is checked on every save, not only on creation. As soon as countdown_time is in the past, any save of that row fails — including one that only extends maintenance_until to buy yourself more time.

This is a limitation of the admin form, not of the package. The management commands exist precisely for it:

$ ./manage.py extend_countdown --service +30m

extend_countdown validates against explicit guards instead of full_clean(), so it can move the end of a window that is already running — which is the state you are in when you need it. See Managing a running countdown.

From the admin alone, the options are to delete the row and create a fresh one, or to schedule indefinitely from the start and stop_countdown when the work is done.

One field remains freely editable while blocked: nothing stops you from deleting the row, which is the universal unblock.

Unblocking

Select the countdown in the change list and use Delete selected, or open it and delete from the form. The next request from the public is no longer blocked — there is no cache to clear and no process to restart.

About the coloured status badges

time_remaining_display wraps its output in <span> elements carrying admin-status--green, admin-status--red or admin-status--gray.

No stylesheet defines those classes

The package does not ship CSS for admin-status--*, and SiteCountdownAdmin declares no class Media. Out of the box the column renders as plain text — the markup is there, the colour is not.

If you want the colours, define them in your own admin override:

templates/admin/base_site.html

{% extends "admin/base_site.html" %}

{% block extrastyle %}
  {{ block.super }}
  <style>
    .admin-status--green { color: #2e7d32; }
    .admin-status--red   { color: #c62828; }
    .admin-status--gray  { color: #757575; }
    .admin-status--bold  { font-weight: 700; }
  </style>
{% endblock %}

For that override to be found, your templates directory must come before app directories in TEMPLATES["DIRS"].

Permissions

Standard Django model permissions apply — django_countdown.add_sitecountdown and friends. Worth thinking through: whoever holds them can close the public site.

Note the asymmetry with the middleware bypass. A staff user with change permission can schedule downtime but, unless they are a superuser, will be blocked out of the front end by their own countdown. They keep admin access either way, because /admin/ is never blocked.