Using Django auth UserAdmin for a custom user model

Question

From the Django.Contrib.Auth docs:

Extending Django’s default User If you’re entirely happy with Django’s User model and you just w

Answer 1

After digging around the Django source code for a while, I found a working soultion. I am not totally happy with this solution, but it seems to work. Feel free to suggest better solutions!

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Django uses UserAdmin to render the nice admin look for User model. By just using this in our admin.py-file, we can get the same look for our model.

from django.contrib.auth.admin import UserAdmin
admin.site.register(MyUser, UserAdmin)

However, this alone is probably not a good solution, since Django Admin will not display any of your special fields. There are two reasons for this:

• UserAdmin uses UserChangeForm as the form to be used when modifying the object, which in its turn uses User as its model.
• UserAdmin defines a formsets-property, later used by UserChangeForm, which does not include your special fields.

So, I created a special change-form which overloads the Meta inner-class so that the change form uses the correct model. I also had to overload UserAdmin to add my special fields to the fieldset, which is the part of this solution I dislike a bit, since it looks a bit ugly. Feel free to suggest improvements!

from django.contrib.auth.admin import UserAdmin
from django.contrib.auth.forms import UserChangeForm

class MyUserChangeForm(UserChangeForm):
    class Meta(UserChangeForm.Meta):
        model = MyUser

class MyUserAdmin(UserAdmin):
    form = MyUserChangeForm

    fieldsets = UserAdmin.fieldsets + (
            (None, {'fields': ('some_extra_data',)}),
    )


admin.site.register(MyUser, MyUserAdmin)