Doing User Profiles In Django - django

Question

I'm trying to set up user profiles in my site so we have:
www.example.com/someuser
www.example.com/anotheruser2
in my urls.py
url(r'^(?P<profile>[0-9A-Fa-f]{1,36})/', 'site.views.profile),
and my view:
def profile(request, profile):
... do something ...
There are two questions:
Is this the correct way to do this or is there a better way?
How should I handle other urls, like "aboutus", etc.
For Point 2, I would do:
url(r'^aboutus/', 'site.views.aboutus'),
url(r'^(?P<profile>[0-9A-Fa-f]{1,36})/', 'site.views.profile),
So now profile will be the catchall for everything else in the site, and I have to check for a valid profile then throw a 404 if a password is not found.
Again, is there a better way to do this?

Answer 1

It's not a good idea to use site.views.profile as a catchall. It's not good separation of responsibilities, it shouldn't be its job. How about something like this instead:
url(r'^profile/$', 'site.views.profile_self'),
url(r'^profile/(?P<profile_name>[0-9A-Fa-f]{1,36})/$', 'site.views.profile'),
url(r'^aboutus/', 'site.views.aboutus'),
For the catchall, use a custom 404 page, or you could let the server raise a 404 error.

Answer 2

accounts/models.py
from django.db import models
class User():
def get_profile(self):
return UserProfile.objects.get_or_create(user_id=self.id)
class UserProfile(models.Model):
user = models.OneToOneField(User)
# another fields
accounts/urls.py
url(r'^profile/$', 'site.views.profile'),
accounts/views.py
from django.contrib.auth.decorators import login_required
#login_required
def profile(request):
# get current logged user profile
profile = request.user.get_profile()
this way the user logged only can see his own profile.
and for the point 2, what's wrong with this?
url(r'^about_us/$', 'site.views.about_us'),
--UPDATE--
ah, ok. then, you are right. but why not with the username?
accounts/urls.py
url(r'^(?P<username>[-\w]+)/$', 'site.views.profile'),