One of the great things of Django is that it ships with a variety of useful apps (and that there is a notion of apps in the first place). One of them is django.contrib.auth, an user authentication system. In Django views you can make use of request.user to retrieve a User instance which represents the currently logged-in user. Django even allows you to attach application specific profiles to these user models. That’s how you do it:
Start by creating a new Django model which will represent a user profile.
from django.db import models
from django.contrib.auth.models import User
class Pirate(models.Model):
"""User profile model. This profile can be retrieved by calling
get_profile() on the User model
"""
account = models.OneToOneField(User)
description = models.TextField(blank=True)
@models.permalink
def get_absolute_url(self):
return ('view_pirate', None, {'username': self.account.username})
def __unicode__(self):
return self.account.username
This profile will just add a description text field to the user profile. Make sure to create a one-to-one relationships to Django’s User model. Next you have to tell Django that it should use this model as a user profile. You do this by adding the following line to your settings.py.
#The value of this variable is the application name plus
#the model name separated by a dot
AUTH_PROFILE_MODULE = 'pirates.Pirate'
That’s all you need to add a profile to the Django User model. You can now retrieve the profile by calling get_profile() on a User instance. But wait – there is one thing left.
When a new User is registered we need to create a user profile. You can do this using signals in the following way (add this after you profile model in models.py).
from django.db.models.signals import post_save
from django.contrib.auth.models import User
# here is the profile model
def user_post_save(sender, instance, created, **kwargs):
"""Create a user profile when a new user account is created"""
if created == True:
p = Pirate()
p.account = instance
p.save()
post_save.connect(user_post_save, sender=User)
