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In Askbot we extend the auth_user table, but for your site - feel free to do it any way you find best.

There doesn't seem to be a nice general solution IMO when several applications at the same time need custom fields associated with the user account.

One way is to have separate user profiles for each app, but then you might (but of course you might as well be lucky and not have this issue) run into a situation when you have say "user_birth_date" saved separately in two places and likely under different names - then you have to deal with keeping data in both places in sync.

Another way is to maintain common user model, which will require patching a single database table to satisfy both applications.

We chose to patch auth_user table which brings own advantages and disadvantages.

Django 1.5 allows to use custom user model, but IMO it is not really helping. You still have to decide to either have per-app user profiles or maintain one table for all user data.