Admin broken for subclasses of User

[Jim Garrison]

I have a model called Teacher, which inherits from django.contrib.auth.models.User.

Here's the story: the "Add Teacher" form in the admin uses the form typically used for editing a user, so you have to type in a fake password string for it to accept the new Teacher. Further, the link to the "change password form" is broken.

Nothing I have said so far is new, however, as this is the subject of ticket #9656. This ticket was closed, saying that the person ought to be subclassing from django.contrib.auth.admin.UserAdmin anyway.

I am filing this ticket because such subclassing from UserAdmin creates additional problems that are even worse than the above issues. In particular,

• If you submit the "Add Teacher" form, a User is created, but a corresponding Teacher is not.
• After editing a Teacher, it redirects to the edit page for "teacher/[id]/", except it uses the id from the User table, not the Teacher table. I have only been able to reproduce this using MySQL; sqlite does not give me this error.

In short, deriving from UserAdmin currently creates more problems than it solves.

[Russell Keith-Magee]

I'm pretty sure the issues that you've raised can be overcome - it's just a matter of writing the right code for UserAdmin. #9656 contains a fully worked example of how to get this to work; consult django-users for more assistance.

However, there's a larger issue here: people want to use different User models, both in admin and in their own code. We need a way to make this easier. I'm going to close this as a dupe of #3011, since that is the ticket for tracking custom User models.