Defining custom user models

The ragendja.auth.models module now provides base models for customizing your User class:

• UserTraits has only a few basic user fields (see the source for more details), but no username.
• EmailUser also adds an email field, email_user(), and an is_banned field, but no username.
• User is the same as Django's User class; it includes a username.

The password field is not required because with the new authentication methods like OpenID and InfoCards you might not need it.

Instead of using AUTH_PROFILE_MODULE you can derive your profile from one of the user classes in ragendja.auth.models. Then, specify your profile module via AUTH_USER_MODULE in settings.py. This should only be the module name (e.g., 'myapp.models') and the class MUST be named User. The result is that whenever you import User from django.contrib.auth.models you automatically get your custom user class and thus don't need to use the ugly get_profile() function to switch around between two models. Note that you can't import django.contrib.auth from the module that defines your User class. If you don't specify a user class then Django's User is used by default.

Warning: If you use this feature you should not import any other models in the AUTH_USR_MODULE because that could cause circular imports. If you still have to import other models make sure they don't try to import the User model!

Example:

# myuser/models.py:
from google.appengine.ext import db
from ragendja.auth.models import EmailUser

class User(EmailUser):
    first_name = db.StringProperty()
    last_name = db.StringProperty()

# settings.py:
AUTH_USER_MODULE = 'myuser.models'

With the above code from django.contrib.auth.models import User becomes the same as from myuser.models import User. In order to maximize code reuse you should always import the Django model in your apps (from django.contrib.auth.models import User), so your code is independent of the User class of your particular project. In fact, if you don't follow this standard you'll get exceptions.

Admin interface

You can also override the UserAdmin class for the admin interface by specifying an AUTH_ADMIN_MODULE to your settings.py. Just redefine UserAdmin in that module, but don't register it because that's done in the original django.contrib.auth.admin module. You can import the original UserAdmin and derive from it if necessary.

Google Accounts

This feature is the foundation of our Google and hybrid accounts integration.