Adding help_text in a superclass attribute

Another way to achieve this without having to fully redefine the field would be:

class MySub1(MySuper):
    pass

MySub1._meta.get_field('some_attr').help_text = 'sub1 help text'


class MySub2(MySuper):
    pass

MySub2._meta.get_field('some_attr').help_text = 'sub2 help text'

I needed to do this for two identical models that have different image sizes. There's probably some brilliant way to generalise this, but for two items my answer will do fine. First create a file called forms.py in your app.

from django import forms
from .models import FeaturedProduct, ShopProduct

class FeaturedProductForm(forms.ModelForm):
    class Meta:
        model = FeaturedProduct
    ihelp = "Image should be 500x220."
    src = forms.ImageField(help_text=ihelp,required=False)

class ShopProductForm(forms.ModelForm):
    class Meta:
        model = FeaturedProduct
    ihelp = "Image should be 100x100."
    src = forms.ImageField(help_text=ihelp,required=False)

Note that required defaults to true, even if you have null=True, blank=True on your models. Then in admin.py define your ModelAdmins as follows:

from .forms import FeaturedProductForm, ShopProductForm

class ShopProductAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
  form = ShopProductForm

class FeaturedProductAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
  form = FeaturedProductForm

I left out a few imports and the whole admin.site.register nonsense. Let me know if you need any more info. The complete list of forms.FIELDS can be found here:

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/forms/fields/