Django is not without it's problems, but some of this isn't correct (upon a quick skim). For example, the Django admin does support filtering and sorting, you just need to indicate this in the admin class.
You can set sorting order and filtering options in your admin class, but the UI doesn't provide clickable column headers or anything like a search box.
EDIT: Apparently I was mistaken, as the replies point out. I read the Django book, but I do not recall this chapter. My apologies.
The admin provides both of these features -- specify the columns you want to be clickable in the `list_display` attribute on your `ModelAdmin` class. Similarly, specify a `search_fields` attribute to add a search box for the columns you want to search.
Why read the documentation or look for examples when you can write a blog post screed and post it on HN?
By default, any field on the model that's displayed as a column in the list of objects is clickable to sort. You can also display things based on other attributes of the model (e.g., calling a method), and if you like you can specify that they're tied to particular fields to get clickable sorting for those as well.
I was going through the django book and here is something that could help you out:
search_fields = ('title',)
"Finally, the search_fields option creates a field that allows text searches. It allows searches by the title field (so you could type Django to show all books with “Django” in the title)."
