I\'m looking for some input on how others would architect this. I\'m going to provide class (django group) based views.
For example, a user\'s group will determine
On a site for an expert on Pinot Noir wine we created per-object access based on a number of different criteria. If the inbound link had a referer field that matched the domain name of a featured winery, then the user got a 'winery token' which expanded to all articles, tasting notes, etc. related to that winery. We use 'named tokens' for give aways at tasting events and they gave access to specific parts of the site. We even use this to grant certain types of permissions to search engine spiders and then make sure that links that come from those search engines have the same permissions as the spider did (ie. no cloaking games).
The short version is that you can create a class (we called them TokenBuckets which hold Tokens) and each object (on a detail page, or a list page, or whatever) can ask the user's TokenBucket if a certain level of access is allowed.
Basically it's a weird kind of ACL system. It wasn't that hard to create the mechanics. All of the magic is in determining under what circumstances which tokens go into the bucket.