Always including the user in the django template context

Question

I am working on a small intranet site for a small company, where user should be able to post. I have imagined a very simple authentication mechanism where people just enter

Answer 1

its possible by default, by doing the following steps, ensure you have added the context 'django.contrib.auth.context_processors.auth' in your settings. By default its added in settings.py, so its looks like this

TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS = (
'django.core.context_processors.request',
'django.contrib.auth.context_processors.auth',
'django.core.context_processors.auth',)

And you can access user object like this,

{% if user.is_authenticated %}
<p>Welcome, {{ user.username }}. Thanks for logging in.</p>
{% else %}
    <p>Welcome, new user. Please log in.</p>
{% endif %}

For more information, refer here http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.2/topics/auth/#authentication-data-in-templates

Answer 2

The hints are in every answer, but once again, from "scratch", for newbies:

authentication data is in templates (almost) by default -- with a small trick:

in views.py:

from django.template import RequestContext
...
def index(request):
    return render_to_response('index.html', 
                              {'var': 'value'},
                              context_instance=RequestContext(request))

in index.html:

...
Hi, {{ user.username }}
var: {{ value }}
... 

From here: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.4/topics/auth/#authentication-data-in-templates

This template context variable is not available if a RequestContext is not being used.