Wiki integration. Requests don't always have sessions. In particular this occurs when a request is made without a trailing slash. The Common middleware redirects when this happens, and the middleware process_request() processing stops before a session can get added. So just set an attribute on the request object for each operation. This seemed weird to me at first, but there are plenty of examples of this in the Django code base already.

"""Models for the IRC application. 
The IRC application simply reports who is in the site's IRC chatroom. A bot in the channel updates
the table and we read it.
"""
from django.db import models

class IrcChannel(models.Model):
   name = models.CharField(max_length=30)
   last_update = models.DateTimeField()

   def __unicode__(self):
      return self.name

   class Meta:
      ordering = ('name', )