Django Funky User

Django 1.5 user model enhancements

This is a work in progress, some functionality is not finalized.

Django Funky User is a Django application with various functionality to replace the built-in Django User model. It is compatible with Django 1.5 and above.

The intention of the project is to utilize (long) email addresses as usernames, have the reset password view send HTML email and fix other minor annoyances with Django's otherwise brilliant auth built-in package.

It also includes a sensible user registration/activation process and is very well suited to bootstrap new projects with basic registered user functionality.

Before digging in too deep, you should be familiar with custom user models in Django: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.5/topics/auth/customizing/#substituting-a-custom-user-model

Features

• An extendable User model that utilizes email as username, and allows long email addresses
• URL configuration (and optionally templates) for Django's built-in auth views
• User registration and email verification functionality
• Password reset email with HTML alternative

You are free to extend the provided User model with your own fields, and you can freely choose what included functionality you want to use in your project.

Built-in Django views configuration

If you use the provided URL configuration, it sets up the following built-in Django views with sensible default templates.

• Login and logout
• Password change
• Password reset

User registration

User registration functionality and templates is also included and works as follows:

• User signs up for an account
• User receives an activation email
• User clicks activation link in mail, account is activated/email is verified and user is automatically logged in

Installation

Install django-funky-user (available on PyPi):

pip install django-funky-user

Add it to INSTALLED_APPS in your settings.py (so Django can locate templates):

INSTALLED_APPS += ['funky_user']

Vanilla setup

If you don't need any additional fields on the user model, and want to use all included functionality, set your project up like this:

Add to your root URL configuration (urls.py):

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    ...
    url(r'^account/', include('funky_user.urls')),
)

Define the bare bones user model in your settings:

AUTH_USER_MODEL = 'funky_user.User'

Remember to run the syncdb management command to create the database table.

Usage and customizations

See example usage of customizations in the example/demo_project/accounts directory.

Model references

When refering to the user model in your code, you should avoid referencing the actual model and instead do something like this (from the Django docs):

from django.contrib.auth import get_user_model
User = get_user_model()

user = User.objects.get(id=1)

When you create a relation to your user model, you should utilize the setting:

from django.conf import settings
from django.db import models

class BlogPost(models.Model):
    author = models.ForeignKey(settings.AUTH_USER_MODEL)

Custom User model

You can easily extend the provided model with your own fields and methods. Create a new application (eg. accounts) and create a new model:

from funky_user.models import AbstractBaseUser

class User(AbstractBaseUser):
    website = models.URLField(_('website'))
    twitter_handle = models.CharField(_('twitter handle'), max_length=100)

When you create your own model, you must point the AUTH_USER_MODEL setting to it.

AUTH_USER_MODEL = 'accounts.User'

Permissions

If you want permissions support (per user, for groups, etc, provided by default in earlier versions of Django), you can use the PermissionsMixin provided by Django:

from django.contrib.auth.models import PermissionsMixin
from funky_user.models import AbstractBaseUser

class User(AbstractBaseUser, PermissionsMixin):
    website = models.URLField(_('website'))

User model in Django admin

For the custom User model to work with the Django admin, we had to override it since it depends on a username field. We have provided a basic admin configuration that works with the default model.

If you don't want the provided admin configuration, unregister it and add your own: In your application's admin.py file:

from django.contrib import admin
from django.contrib.auth import get_user_model

admin.site.unregister(get_user_model())

You can subclass the provided admin configuration and override the things you need.

Included views and URL configuration

The URL configuration is split into two modules: login, logout, password change and password reset (Django's built-in views) are located in funky_user.urls.auth, and the registration functionality is in funky_user.urls.signup. If you want to utilize both, you can import from funky_user.urls directly.

If you want custom functionality in the same URL namespace, you can just extend the provided configuration in your own URL configuration:

from django.conf.urls import patterns, url
from funky_user.urls import urlpatterns

urlpatterns += patterns('accounts.views',
    url(r'^edit/$', 'edit', name='user-edit'),
)

Templates

Since every project has different requirements for templates, we have chosen not to include them with the funky_user package. Instead they are available separately, in the tests/templates/auth folder. Just drop them in your project's template folder and you should have a decent starting point. (They fit perfectly with Twitter's Bootstrap project.)

Implementation notes

• We would like to know which of our registered users has logged in and have the last_login field be nullable. But to override it, we need to duplicate Django's AbstractBaseUser model with password functionality, etc. Instead, we set last_login to a date way back (1970-01-01) when a user registers.

TODO

Developer notes

Things to do:

• Only send activation mail if user is inactive?
• Email field in login as EmailField?
• Remove dependency on django-groove, include send_html_email function?
• Provide example User models in documentation, remove from models.py?
• More tests

Random thoughts:

• Don't include a concrete class, so we don't have to manage migrations in this project?
• Add translations
• Support for changing email addresses?
• Package name: django-funky-user
• Module name: funky_user
• Template directory name: auth?
• URL name prefix: user? account? accounts?