how to override the verbose name of a superclass model field in django

Bearing in mind the caveat that modifying Foo._meta.fields will affect the superclass too - and therefore is only really useful if the superclass is abstract, I've wrapped the answer @Gerry gave up as a reusable class decorator:

def modify_fields(**kwargs):
    def wrap(cls):
        for field, prop_dict in kwargs.items():
            for prop, val in prop_dict.items():
                setattr(cls._meta.get_field(field), prop, val)
        return cls
    return wrap

Use it like this:

@modify_fields(timestamp={
    'verbose_name': 'Available From',
    'help_text': 'Earliest date you can book this'})
class Purchase(BaseOrderItem):
    pass

The example above changes the verbose_name and help_text for the inherited field 'timestamp'. You can pass in as many keyword args as there are fields you want to modify.

A simple hack I have used is:

class SuperFoo(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField('name of SuperFoo instance', max_length=50)
    ...
    class Meta: 
        abstract = True

class Foo(SuperFoo):
    ... # do something that changes verbose_name of name field of SuperFoo
Foo._meta.get_field('name').verbose_name = 'Whatever'

Your best bet would be setting/changing the label in the form itself. Referring to the name field of the Foo model (eg. by looking it up in Foo._meta.fields) will actually give you a reference to the name field of SuperFoo, so changing its verbose_name will change it in both models.

Also, adding a name field to the Foo class won't work either, because...

Overriding fields in a parent model leads to difficulties in areas such as initialising new instances (specifying which field is being intialised in Model.__init__) and serialization. These are features which normal Python class inheritance doesn't have to deal with in quite the same way, so the difference between Django model inheritance and Python class inheritance isn't merely arbitrary.