title: Django, request.user is always Anonymous User
body: <p>I am using a custom authentication backend for Django (which runs off couchdb). I have a custom user model.</p>
  
  <p>As part of the login, I am doing a <code>request.user = user</code> and saving the user id in session.
  However, on subsequent requests, I am not able to retrieve the request.user. It is always an AnonymousUser. I can, however, retrieve the user id from the session and can confirm that the session cookie is being set correctly.</p>
  
  <p>What am I missing?</p>
  
  <p>I do not want to use a relational db as I want to maintain all my user data in couchdb.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Edit</strong>: I have written a class which does not inherit from Django's auth User. It, however, has the username and email attributes. For this reason, my backend does not return a class which derives from auth User.</p>