The message system is just a bit too light for me. Rather than assume all messages indicate a successful action I think they should also be able to point out errors (unrelated to form validation obviously) or just display generic notices. This patch makes it possible to create 3 types of messages: success (default), failure, and generic. Normal messages will remain the same (always success). For a failure/error or generic message you simply pass an extra argument like so:
user.message_set.create(message=u'Something went wrong!', category='F') # failure or error
user.message_set.create(message=u'This is just a notice', category='G') # generic message
user.message_set.create(message=u'It worked!', category='S') # explicit success
user.message_set.create(message=u'It worked!') # implicit success
Now in your template you can distinguish messages by type, and then use CSS to style them differently.
{% if messages %}
<ul id="messages">
{% for message in messages %}
<li class="{{ message.get_category_display }}">{{ message }}</li>
{% endfor %}
</ul>
{% endif %}
