Question

To add additional user profile information in Django, it seems that using AUTH_PROFILE_MODEL is the suggested way to go.

However, are there any disadvantages of adding additional profile fields directly to the django.contrib.auth.models.User table? To me, this seems to be much easier/straightforward (though granted, I don’t yet have a grasp on using signals).

Are there any very strong practical reasons against doing it this way?

Answer 1

I can think of following reasons:

Django updates

You have to update your contrib.auth each time you update Django so you don’t break your application, and this is a maintenance nightmare. Using AUTH_PROFILE_MODEL method makes Django updates painless while it provides ability to add new information to User. This is called loose coupling i belive.

User dependant applications

3rd party application that heavily rely on User having the exact same fields will fail if you for example add fields to User model that are declared as NOT NULL or remove some that are expected to be there.

Further reading about AUTH_PROFILE_MODEL:

• James Bennett’s tips on extending User model
• Django official docs
• deprecation of AUTH_PROFILE_MODULE thread on django-developers mailing list