Add this to your admin change_list.html template to replace the actions drop-down with buttons. This is a rewritten version of snippet [1931](http://djangosnippets.org/snippets/1931/) with Django 1.3 compatibility and cleaner code. Thanks to [andybak](http://djangosnippets.org/users/andybak/) for the idea.
Add this to any admin changelist and your actions drop-down will be replaced with user-friendly buttons. Why mess around with templates and subclassing admin classes when you can just mangle the page with jQuery! ;-) It also adds a 'select all' label to explain the mystery top check-box (well it was a mystery to several of my clients). The line "if ($('div.actions option:gt(0)').length<=8)" checks that there aren't more than 8 actions and falls back to the drop-down if there are. Requires jQuery to be loaded.