I'm trying to build a Django website that will be maintained and used by university students mainly. I need to restrict access to a few pages for certain approved students, but it would be very unmaintainable if I needed to create a new Django user for every student that wants to log in. Luckily, the university provides an API to check whether a username/password combination is correct. So I had the idea to create an authentication model complementary to Django's model, where users' university account can get approved by an admin, after which it is a valid login to view certain pages.
So essentially, some users may use a Django account (if they're in charge for the content of the website), and other users may just log in to view some pages with their uni account. For the uni account, the minimum amount of info should be stored (in other words, only the username is really required to approve certain users).
I can't seem to figure out how to build such a system in Django. I cannot use the standard User object because it stores data that is completely redundant, and I cannot substitute the user model because that would only make things incredibly complex. It seems reasonable to forget the User model altogether, but Authenticate needs to return a valid user. This makes me wonder, can I create regular Django users with as little information filled in as possible (dummy data except for the username), and then authenticate them with the API? Probably, but that hardly seems like a good idea.
