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