Admin changelist audit: make all listing pages manageable (perf + findability)

[jonfroehlich]

Follow-up to #1082 (banner admin). A deep-dive audit of all 16 model-admin changelist (list) pages surfaced two cross-cutting themes plus several latent bugs. This issue tracks the multi-phase cleanup.

Theme 1 — N+1 query performance (biggest impact)

Many changelists have callable columns (counts, author lists, "most recent artifact", thumbnails) that hit the DB per row, with no select_related/prefetch_related/annotate, and most inherit Django's default 100 rows/page.

• ProjectAdmin — ~10 DB-touching callable columns; a full list page can fire 1,000+ queries.
• PersonAdmin — 14 columns, nearly all reverse-relation walks; PositionRoleListFilter also loops over every Person on every request.
• Publication/Talk/Poster/Video/Grant/Award have M2M/FK callables (authors, projects, sponsor, recipients) with no prefetch.

Theme 2 — findability gaps

• News and Keyword had no search box at all.
• Could not search Publications/Talks/Posters by author name.
• Several admins had no default ordering (Poster, Project, Sponsor, Keyword, ProjectUmbrella).
• date_hierarchy absent on every date-driven model.

Latent bugs

• NewsAdmin.get_display_thumbnail was not exception-guarded → one corrupt image 500s the whole News changelist.
• PhotoAdmin.get_resolution_as_str reads image dimensions per row and raises if the file is missing.

Phased plan

• Phase 1 — quick wins + bug fixes (this PR): News thumbnail crash fix, missing search_fields (incl. author search), fixed DateField string-searches, missing ordering, date_hierarchy on date models. Config-only, no query-shape changes.
• Phase 2 — N+1 perf on Project & Person: get_queryset annotations + prefetch, page-size caps, verified with before/after query counts.
• Phase 3 — N+1 perf on the artifact family: list_prefetch_related/list_select_related on Publication/Talk/Poster/Video/Grant/Award.
• Phase 4 — workflow niceties: list_editable inline toggles, bulk actions (project visibility, BibTeX export), Keyword cleanup tooling (unused-tag filter, broaden usage counts, merge action), Photo project column + guard get_resolution_as_str.

Admin pages are not Pa11y-scanned and these touch no models/migrations.

[jonfroehlich]

Post-merge follow-up (after both PR #1347 and the #1269 prose-editor work land on master):

• Re-check NewsAdmin.get_display_thumbnail guard. PR Admin changelist quick-wins + News thumbnail crash fix (#1346, Phase 1) #1347 wraps the existing easy_thumbnails path in a try/except so a corrupt image can't 500 the News changelist. Replace django-ckeditor (CKEditor 4 is EOL with known XSS issues) #1269 changes how News images are handled — the two branches merge cleanly (verified: zero conflicts, both changes land in different regions of news_admin.py), but once both are in, confirm the guard still wraps the correct/current thumbnail code and that the regression test in test_admin_changelist.py still exercises a meaningful failure path.

No conflict expected — this is hygiene only.

[jonfroehlich]

Phase 2 done → PR #1349. N+1 fixes on the Project & Person changelists (both now constant-query regardless of row count; count columns also became sortable). Verified directly: a fully-warmed 12-row People changelist is 10 queries, flat. Merges cleanly with Phase 1 (#1347).

Remaining: Phase 3 (artifact-family list_prefetch_related) and Phase 4 (list_editable toggles, bulk actions, Keyword cleanup tooling).

[jonfroehlich]

Phase 3 done → PR #1350. Prefetch on the artifact-family changelists (Publication/Talk/Poster/Video/Grant/Award) via get_queryset(); each now flat-query as rows grow. Note for future changelist work: Django has no list_prefetch_related option (only list_select_related) — prefetch must go through get_queryset(); the flat-query tests caught it as a silent no-op.

That completes the originally-scoped audit phases. Remaining optional Phase 4 niceties (list_editable toggles, bulk actions, Keyword cleanup tooling) are still open if wanted.

[jonfroehlich]

Phase 4 done → PR #1351. Inline is_visible toggle + public/private actions (Project); Export-as-BibTeX + peer-reviewed actions (Publication); broadened keyword usage counts (all 6 referencing models) + a "Used / Unused" filter to find orphan tags (Keyword). Auto-merges cleanly with the open Phase 3 (#1350).

Deferred (own follow-up PR): the destructive merge-keywords action — select keywords → intermediate page to pick the target → reassign all 6 reverse relations, delete the rest. Splitting it out so the destructive path gets focused review + tests.

That covers all the audit phases (1–4) bar the keyword-merge follow-up.