Adding fields to the User model

Please excuse me if the answer to my question is painfully obvious but I’m new to Django and I’m not very familiar with custom user models.

If I wanted to add another field to the user model (for example, “department” - the users are employees), where would I add it?

I figured I could add a department variable to models.py but it doesn’t seem to work. When I login to the admin site, I don’t see a “department” field when I add a user. Similarly, I don’t see a “name” field in the admin site - I only see First Name, Last Name, and Email Address.

# models.py
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
from __future__ import unicode_literals, absolute_import

from django.contrib.auth.models import AbstractUser
from django.core.urlresolvers import reverse
from django.db import models
from django.utils.encoding import python_2_unicode_compatible


@python_2_unicode_compatible
class User(AbstractUser):

    # First Name and Last Name do not cover name patterns
    # around the globe.
    name = models.CharField(blank=True, max_length=255)
    department = models.CharField(blank=True, max_length=5)

    def __str__(self):
        return self.username

    def get_absolute_url(self):
        return reverse('users:detail', kwargs={'username': self.username})

[dezoito]

I hadn’t had any success with users/admin.py before, but the SO answer seems to be what was missing.

Overriding the fieldsets, however, is only working for the user change form. The user creation form remains unaffected - which is odd - but I can live with that.

Here’s what my users/admin.py is looking like, in case anyone needs a quick example (or can spot what is still missing):

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
from __future__ import absolute_import, unicode_literals

from django import forms
from django.contrib import admin
from django.contrib.auth.admin import UserAdmin as AuthUserAdmin
from django.contrib.auth.forms import UserChangeForm, UserCreationForm
from .models import User


class MyUserChangeForm(UserChangeForm):
    class Meta(UserChangeForm.Meta):
        model = User

class MyUserCreationForm(UserCreationForm):

    error_message = UserCreationForm.error_messages.update({
        'duplicate_username': 'This username has already been taken.'
    })

    class Meta(UserCreationForm.Meta):
        model = User

    def clean_username(self):
        username = self.cleaned_data["username"]
        try:
            User.objects.get(username=username)
        except User.DoesNotExist:
            return username
        raise forms.ValidationError(self.error_messages['duplicate_username'])


@admin.register(User)
class MyUserAdmin(AuthUserAdmin):
    form = MyUserChangeForm
    add_form = MyUserCreationForm
    fieldsets = AuthUserAdmin.fieldsets + (
            ('User Profile', {'fields': ('name',
                                        'location',
                                        'department',
                                        'phone',
                                        'extension')}),
    )
    list_display = ('username', 'name','location','department')
    search_fields = ['name']

Again, thank you for the help.

[dezoito]

From the Django 2.1 Release notes:

UserCreationForm and UserChangeForm no longer need to be rewritten for a custom user model.