The least painful and indeed Django-recommended way of doing this is through a OneToOneField(User) property.
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If you wish to store information related to User, you can use a one-to-one relationship to a model containing the fields for additional information. This one-to-one model is often called a profile model, as it might store non-auth related information about a site user.
That said, extending django.contrib.auth.models.User and supplanting it also works...
Some kinds of projects may have authentication requirements for which Django’s built-in User model is not always appropriate. For instance, on some sites it makes more sense to use an email address as your identification token instead of a username.
[Ed: Two warnings and a notification follow, mentioning that this is pretty drastic.]
I would definitely stay away from changing the actual User class in your Django source tree and/or copying and altering the auth module.
A "slug" is a way of generating a valid URL, generally using data already obtained. For instance, a slug uses the title of an article to generate a URL. I advise to generate the slug by means of a function, given the title (or another piece of data), rather than setting it manually.
An example:
<title> The 46 Year Old Virgin </title>
<content> A silly comedy movie </content>
<slug> the-46-year-old-virgin </slug>
Now let's pretend that we have a Django model such as:
class Article(models.Model):
title = models.CharField(max_length=100)
content = models.TextField(max_length=1000)
slug = models.SlugField(max_length=40)
How would you reference this object with a URL and with a meaningful name? You could for instance use Article.id so the URL would look like this:
www.example.com/article/23
Or, you might want to reference the title like this:
www.example.com/article/The 46 Year Old Virgin
Since spaces aren't valid in URLs, they must be replaced by %20, which results in:
www.example.com/article/The%2046%20Year%20Old%20Virgin
Both attempts are not resulting in very meaningful, easy-to-read URL. This is better:
www.example.com/article/the-46-year-old-virgin
In this example, the-46-year-old-virgin is a slug: it is created from the title by down-casing all letters, and replacing spaces by hyphens -.
Also see the URL of this very web page for another example.
Best Answer
Django versions 1.8 and later:
You should use
get_fields():The
get_all_field_names()method is deprecated starting from Django 1.8 and will be removed in 1.10.The documentation page linked above provides a fully backwards-compatible implementation of
get_all_field_names(), but for most purposes the previous example should work just fine.Django versions before 1.8:
That should do the trick.
That requires an actual model instance. If all you have is a subclass of
django.db.models.Model, then you should callmyproject.myapp.models.MyModel._meta.get_all_field_names()