How do I migrate my current site's users table ( mysql+md5 passwords ) to my new django postgres setup?

Question

I currently have a news website setup in PHP/MYSQL that's a bit old and I'm in the process of migrating it to a new django site that uses Postgresql 8.4 and Psycopg2.

Django's admin models contain a auth_user table and I suspect this is the table I will need to insert all my user rows into.

Q#1: I should just rely on this already made table from when I syncdb with the admin, right?

It seems to be using sha1 encrypted passwords, the superadmin's password is 51 chars long and the password field is a VARCHAR(128).

Q#2: Do I have no choice but to force the user to create a new password from their stored email address? It's better to just keep the password column as is, since SHA1 is probably more secure than MD5 anyway.

Q#3: If I go about adding custom columns to this auth_user table for things such as aim_username, and other various user specific columns then would this messup the admin somehow? Would I need to override the default admin model somewhere?

Answer 1

I'm not sure what you're asking with question 1.

For question 2, if you want to make the transition seamless to the user, what you could do is maintain a listing of the user's original passwords. When someone tries to login, you look up their e-mail in the original listing and check the md5 of the password they logged in with against the record you have in the database. If you have a match, remove the record from the original table and update the password record in the auth_user table by hashing the password you have from the form.

For question 3, Django allows you the ability to specify a user profile model that can contain any extra information you want. Have a look at: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/auth/#storing-additional-information-about-users.