login_optional decorator for Django?

Question

I'm developing a site with a login box on the base.html template page. For all the pages that require the user to be logged in, I'm using the login_required decorator. However, I'd like the user to be able to login on the other pages if they want to.

Among the things that the "login_required" decorator does is handle the nuts and bolts of logging in, in addition to verifying you're logged in before showing you the desired page.

What I'd like is a "login_optional" decorator (or optional parameter within login_required) for these optional pages. I can't find such a thing. Does it exist and I'm just missing it or do I need to roll my own login handling routine for these views?

Thanks

Mike
EDIT (sample code)
template

<form action="" method="post">
    <label for="username">Username:</label>
    <input type="text" name="username" value="" id="username" size="10"/>
    <label for="password">Password:</label>
    <input type="password" name="password" value="" id="password" size="10"/>
    <input type="submit" value="Login"/>
    <input type="hidden" name="next" value="{{ next|escape }}"/>
</form

>

login required code

@login_required
def chooseDistributor(request):
    user = request.user
    # blah stuff deleted
    # NOTHING TO HANDLE request.POST!
    return render_to_response('choose_distributor.html',locals())

login optional code

def showWelcome(request):
    user = request.user
    return render_to_response('welcome/home.html',locals())

Answer 1

What do you mean? login_optional is just a view without a login_required decorator... :p.

Note that the login_required decorator does not handle any login functionality, it just checks if a user is logged in by controlling the User object of the request context. If he/she isn't logged in, this decorator redirects to a page that holds the real login functionality.

So the decorator is just a check + redirect, making login optional for a page hence is just removing the decorator.