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.

"""urls for the IRC application"""
from django.conf.urls import patterns, url

urlpatterns = patterns('irc.views',
   url(r'^$', 'view', name='irc-main'),
)