The Problem: After login the page would render correctly as if the user was logged in, but when navigating to another page it was as if the user wasn’t logged in. Upon investigation I could see that the cookies weren’t being saved.

The Solution: A quick Gogole search brought me to this blog post: IE Blocking iFrame Cookies. It’s an easy to fix P3P issue, and the author describes how to add the necessary header for various languages/frameworks.

Rather than add the header to each Django view or write custom Django middleware, I just added the header to my Apache configuration. The following goes in your VirtualHost Directive:

Header add P3P ‘CP=”IDC DSP COR ADM DEVi TAIi PSA PSD IVAi IVDi CONi HIS OUR IND CNT”‘

In order to work you have to enable mod_headers (run “sudo a2enmod headers”).

Django only allows you to specify one database, and although a new database is created for unittests, it still uses most of the same settings (auto prepending “test_” to the database name), which means a Django install using MySQL also uses MySQL for unittests.

To get around this problem, I created a file in my project root called test_settings.py containing the following lines:

I then opened my settings.py, imported sys, and inserted the following lines at the end of the file:

If one of the command line arguments is “test”, that means a unittest is being run, in which case Django will attempt to import test_settings.py, which will override the database settings and use Sqlite instead. Migrations won’t be an issue, since Django South uses the old syncdb command for generating databases for unittests.

Hope this helps you save some time testing.