title: integrating third-party django apps and templates
body: <p>I'm new to Django and fairly confused about how third-party apps are best integrated. In my (possibly naive) interpretation of DRY, I want to minimize copy/pasting not only my own code but other people's code as well, so I'm happy with, for example, the pattern of using contrib.auth as mostly a black box if I needed additional info on auth.User (by extending auth.User with a UserProfile object or inheritance). And this was how I imagined I'd use most third-party apps as well.</p>
  
  <p>However, I quickly found out this was very difficult, so now I've resigned to having "copies" of all of my third-party apps living inside my project folder that are basically entire copies with minimal changes. The final straw was me wanting to add a basic blog (I settled on django-basic-blog) and needing to just change a single template, and I thought of no better solution than just making a copy of that app inside my project with the single template changed. </p>
  
  <p>My questions:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>in this specific case where I need to change just a single template, is this (copy the entire app over) the best I can do? If I just needed to change a single model I can keep the third-party app respectfully intact and do a model inheritance in my own app...</li>
  <li>in general, this practice of copying the apps under my project and patching each a tiny bit feels crazily wasteful and dirty. It also feels like if I'm using a frequently-updated third-party app it will be a pain to sync the changes. Should I just learn to love the bomb or is there some obvious architectural pattern / Django-provided assistance I am missing?</li>
  </ul>