In Django ORM, A "Student - Course" Model design

Question

I would like to design a model for an online private school in Django. It focuses on relation among Students, Tutors and Courses.

The most important factor that should be considered is that Students can add and Tutors can create courses.

I'd like to extend built-in Djano's "User" and extend its functionality.

I have designed a very draft model like this:

from django.db import models
from django.contrib.auth.models import User , Group
from django.utils.translation import ugettext as _


class Course(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length = 70)
    slug = models.SlugField()
    created = models.DateTimeField(auto_now = True)
    updated = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add = True)
    description = models.TextField()
    student = models.ManyToManyField('Student' , null = True, blank = True, related_name = _('Student courses'))
    tutor = models.ManyToManyField('Tutor' , null = True, blank = True , related_name = _('Tutor courses'))


    def __unicode__(self):
        return self.name

    class Meta:
        verbose_name = ('course')
        verbose_name_plural = ('courses')


class Student(models.Model):
    user = models.ForeignKey(User , blank = True)
    #photo = models.ImageField(_('photo'), upload_to='photos/', blank=True)



class Tutor(models.Model):
    user = models.ForeignKey(User , blank = True)
    #photo = models.ImageField(_('photo'), upload_to='photos/', blank=True)

First of all: is it a correct approach? I'd like to have User, so I can use it in View and Template layers.

Second, how can I query that which student has got which courses?

Thank you beforehand ..

Answer 1

Rather than have a Student and Tutor model I would look at using the user profiles supported by Django. Also the auth module has a fairly complete permissions model, that you could use instead of creating your own system to allow only some users to create courses.