Django admin/doc/views/ all blank or broken - django-admin

Question

I'm trying to use Django's built-in admin docs feature to make writing templates easier. Supposedly if you go to /admin/docs/views you should get documentation for every view in your application. I see a list, but none of the links work:
-) Any view listed that's related to my application just goes to a blank page with nothing but the name of the view as a header.
-) The views related to admin all give me Django 404 errors when I click on them, except those that are related to the docs itself. The docs-related links also give me blank pages. (i.e. clicking /admin/doc/filters gives a blank page with nothing but "django.contrib.admindocs.views.template_filter_index" as a title, but clicking /admin/auth/user gives me a Django 404 error
The 404 errors lead me to suspect my URLconf is wrong, but all I did was uncomment the built-in lines. The relevant sections read:
# Uncomment the admin/doc line below to enable admin documentation:
(r'^admin/doc/', include('django.contrib.admindocs.urls')),
# Uncomment the next line to enable the admin:
(r'^admin/', include(admin.site.urls)),
And I have no idea what to make of the blank pages. Do I need to provide some extra meta information somewhere, like I know you need to provide the get_absolute_url on models for some of the admin features to work right?
Even if no one knows the answer, any documentation on the admin docs feature would be useful -- I've been Google all over (and searching StackOverflow) and this feature seems very little-documented.
Thanks!

Answer 1

You need to add 'django.contrib.admindocs' to your INSTALLED_APPS in settings.py. It should already be there and commented out. Though it would be nice if the comment in urls.py mentioned it ... Source.

Answer 2

I've never looked at the views admin doc pages before -- I've never had a need to. B4ut you're right, they seem to be -- lacking in potential features.
If you give your views functions docstrings (documentation), that content will appear on your "blank pages".
Most -- no, all -- of the admin sites views are actually decorated member methods of admin.sites.AdminSite. I looked around, and a view of mine which uses a decorator also suffers from the 404.
The view responsible for view details starts:
def view_detail(request, view):
if not utils.docutils_is_available:
return missing_docutils_page(request)
mod, func = urlresolvers.get_mod_func(view)
try:
view_func = getattr(import_module(mod), func)
except (ImportError, AttributeError):
raise Http404
title, body, metadata = utils.parse_docstring(view_func.__doc__)
...
You can see it tries to import the view to get info from it; if the view is actually a decorator (which probably used an internal function to wrap the real view), it won't be able to import it. eg, if you do from django.contrib.admin.sites import index in a django shell, you'll get an ImportError, whereas django.contrib.admin.site.index (note the singular site) is a:
<bound method AdminSite.index of <django.contrib.admin.sites.AdminSite object at 0x...>>
Further, that last line in my snippet seems to indicate that there's a capability for finer control over what shows up on those pages, if you care to figure out the template that util.parse_docstring uses.