Using custom User admin breaks change password form in Django's admin

Question

I'm using a custom User admin by:

class CustomUserAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    model = User
    ...
admin.site.unregister(User)
admin.site.register(User, CustomUserAdmin)

but when I try to change the password via the admin page I get a 404.

user object with primary key u'4/password' does not exist.

Reverting back to the default User admin works fine.

Answer 1

The default UserAdmin in django.contrib.auth.admin implements a lot of functionality, including the change password page.

Your CustomUserAdmin should subclass UserAdmin instead of admin.ModelAdmin, unless you want to reimplement that functionality yourself.

class CustomUserAdmin(UserAdmin):
    # as an example, this custom user admin orders users by email address
    ordering = ('email',)

admin.site.unregister(User)
admin.site.register(User, CustomUserAdmin)

Answer 2

Also:

As per the docs, if you inherit from AbstractBaseUser you cannot use the default UserAdmin; or, put another way, you can but only a subset of the functionality will work - changing an existing password might work, but adding a new user will throw exceptions.