>In particular, a number of external applications/libraries have hard-coded references to auth.User, so those need to be patched. On that front, if I'm using a

>In particular, a number of external applications/libraries have hard-coded references to auth.User, so those need to be patched. On that front, if I'm using a full blown framework (like Django or Rails) I try not to use any third party plugins for it. Third party libraries (ie. framework agnostic), yes, but not plugins. I find that this is a sane middle ground between: a) doing it yourself from scratch (maybe using a minimal base like Flask/Sinatra) and b) adding the kitchen-sink of variable quality and volatile third party plugins, that are "here today, gone tomorrow". This way you know you're building in a stable base that is gonna be there tomorrow (at least, most of it), that is, the framework, and you also get to build and know intimately the rest of the dependencies you might need.