Looking for the right way to specialize the User model

I'm using Django 1.5 and I needed an api to control the addition of users and the management of users on those groups. Django's rest framework proved a good starting point but I hit issues with the ManyToMany relation groups which means that there is no model for the user_group which in turn complicated the API. I worked around this fairly easily with the following code:

from django.db import models  from django.contrib.auth.models import User, UserManager, Group    class UserGroup(models.Model):      user = models.ForeignKey(User)      group = models.ForeignKey(Group)      class Meta:  	# auth_user_groups is created by the ManyToMany relation field  	# in the contrib.auth.models User model  	managed = False  	db_table = 'auth_user_groups'    # Add an easy way to get at this from the User objects  def get_user_groups(self):      return UserGroup.objects.filter(user=self)  User.add_to_class('get_user_groups', get_user_groups)  

This handles the problem by allowing the API to have convenient usergroup urls and endpoints but I don't like using 'add_to_class'. I really just want a specialized user class but I could not get the following to work:

class APIUser(User):      objects = UserManager()      class Meta:  	managed = False  	db_table = 'auth_user'        def get_user_groups(self):  	return UserGroup.objects.filter(user=self)  

Sadly, it fails with, for example, "Unknown column 'auth_user.user_ptr_id' in 'where clause'" if I try to save a newly created APIUser.

Am I barking up the wrong tree or just missing something obvious?

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