[Django]-Django – how to write users and profiles handling in best way?

users should be able to register and authenticate

django.contrib.auth is the module you want. Be sure to check the docs for custom login forms.

every user should have profile (or model with all required fields)

You need to set settings.AUTH_PROFILE_MODULE, as noted by others.

Information about setting up the user profile model is available for the latest version, 1.1, and 1.0. It hasn’t been dropped.

users dont need django builtin admin panel, but they need to edit their profiles/models via simple web form

You can create a form and view just like you would for any other app; maybe make a “user control panel” app for handling these things. Your views would then interact with the django.contrib.auth.models.User and django.contrib.auth.models.Group models. You can set this up to do whatever you need.

EDIT: Responding to your questions-in-the-form-of-an-answer (paging Alex Trebek)…

The second version of djangobook, covering django 1.0 (that is way closer to 1.2 than 0.96) no longer has that information anywhere, what makes me highly confused – has anything changed? Is there other, better, more secure way to handle users and their profiles? Therefore this question asked.

I wouldn’t recommend djangobook as a reference; it’s out of date on this topic. User profiles exist and I’m using them in my Django 1.1.1 site; I’m even populating them from NIS.

Please use the links I provided above. They go directly to the actual Django documentation and are authoritative.

By the way, I forgot to ask, if the way you all refer to (that is AUTH_PROFILE_MODULE) will create automatically upon registration

Answered in the docs.

and require the profile to exist upon any action (user withoud existing, filled profile should not exists, this is why I was thinking about extending User model somehow)?

The profile needs to exist if User.get_profile() is called.

Will it get updated as well (people are mentioning ‘signals’ on various blogs related to this subject)?

It’s like any other model: it only gets updated when you change the fields and call save().

The signal part is how you hook in a function to create a profile for a new User:

from django.db.models.signals import post_save
from django.contrib.auth import User
from myUserProfileApp import UserProfile

def make_user_profile(sender, **kwargs):
    if 'created' not in kwargs or not kwargs['created']:
        return

    # Assumes that the `ForeignKey(User)` field in "UserProfile" is named "user".
    profile = UserProfile(user=kwargs["instance"])
    # Set anything else you need to in the profile, then...
    profile.save()

post_save.connect(make_user_profile, sender=User, weak=False)

This only creates a new profile for a new User. Existing Users need to have profiles manually added:

$ ./manage.py shell
>>> from django.contrib.auth import User
>>> from myUserProfileApp import UserProfile
>>> for u in User.objects.all():
...  UserProfile(user=u).save() # Add other params as needed.
...

If you have some users with profiles and some without, you’ll need to do a bit more work:

>>> for u in User.objects.all():
...  try:
...   UserProfile(user=u).save() # Add other params as needed.
...  except:
...   pass