Upgrading Django to 1.5 with Django-CMS - user model issue

Question

I have just moved a site from Django-CMS 2.3.5 to 2.4.1 (with help from Stackoverflow) under Django 1.4.

I am now upgrading to Django 1.5, which is only hard because I need to update the old separate user profile to a new custom user model. I followed the excellent instructions here, and also replaced all references to User with settings.AUTH_USER_MODEL.

Unfortunately Django-CMS's models apparently still refer to User though: when I type manage.py runserver, I get this error:

CommandError: One or more models did not validate:
cms.pagemoderatorstate: 'user' defines a relation with the model 'auth.User', which has been swapped out. Update the relation to point at settings.AUTH_USER_MODEL.
cms.globalpagepermission: 'user' defines a relation with the model 'auth.User', which has been swapped out. Update the relation to point at settings.AUTH_USER_MODEL.
cms.pagepermission: 'user' defines a relation with the model 'auth.User', which has been swapped out. Update the relation to point at settings.AUTH_USER_MODEL.
cms.pageuser: 'user_ptr' defines a relation with the model 'auth.User', which has been swapped out. Update the relation to point at settings.AUTH_USER_MODEL.
cms.pageuser: 'created_by' defines a relation with the model 'auth.User', which has been swapped out. Update the relation to point at settings.AUTH_USER_MODEL.
cms.pageusergroup: 'created_by' defines a relation with the model 'auth.User', which has been swapped out. Update the relation to point at settings.AUTH_USER_MODEL.

How can I get Django-CMS to use the new user model?

thanks!

Answer 1

There is very simple solution. Just need to register your custom user before importing CMSPlugin. Example:

from django.db import models
from django.contrib.auth import models as auth_models
from django.contrib.auth.models import AbstractUser

class User(AbstractUser):
  telephone = models.CharField(max_length=100)
  email = models.CharField(max_length=100)

auth_models.User = User

from cms.models import CMSPlugin

Answer 2

For others with this question, here is my summary of what I have learned from https://github.com/divio/django-cms/issues/1798.

There are four potential options:

1. If you need your custom user model to have a name other than User, you'll need to wait.
2. You can call the custom user model User - though when I tried this, I got errors about clashes with related m2m fields. There are some further details on the above link which may help resolve this.
3. Django 1.5 still lets you use user profiles. So if you are ok with using a deprecated feature, you can still use Django-CMS 2.4 and Django 1.5 with user profiles instead of a custom user model. (I misread the Django docs here and thought user profiles were not supported in Django 1.5.)
4. You can often get away without either a user profile or a custom user model - they are best used to add data specifically for user authentication. Instead, you can use another model with a one-to-one relationship to User, and use the reverse relationship to access it.

In my case, I am going to go with #3 in the short-run and #4 in the long-run.