Question

(Now that Django 1.1 is in release candidate status, it could be a good time to ask this.)

I’ve been searing everywhere for ways to extend Django’s comments app to support authenticated comments. After reading through the comments model a few times, I found that a ForeignKey to User already exists.

From django.contrib.comments.models:

class Comment(BaseCommentAbstractModel):
    """
    A user comment about some object.
    """

    # Who posted this comment? If ``user`` is set then it was an authenticated
    # user; otherwise at least user_name should have been set and the comment
    # was posted by a non-authenticated user.
    user        = models.ForeignKey(User, verbose_name=_('user'),
                    blank=True, null=True, related_name="%(class)s_comments")
    user_name   = models.CharField(_("user's name"), max_length=50, blank=True)
    user_email  = models.EmailField(_("user's email address"), blank=True)
    user_url    = models.URLField(_("user's URL"), blank=True)

I can’t seem to get my head around setting user. If I use comments as is, even if I’m authenticated, it still seems to require the other fields. I’m guessing I should override the form and do it there? On top of that, if I use user, I should ignore the fact that user_name, user_email and user_url will be empty and just pull that information from a related profile model, correct?

While the answers could be quite trivial in the end, I’m just surprised that it hasn’t been written or even talked about.

Answer 1

Theju wrote an authenticated comments app — http://thejaswi.info/tech/blog/2009/08/04/reusable-app-authenticated-comments/