Got bit by this one again, which I assume is going to be pretty common if you’re trying to use the AuthenticationForm as you would normally use a form.

When I use forms, I get into the habit of doing something like this:

if request.method == 'POST':
    f = MyForm(request.POST)
    if f.is_valid():
        do_whatever()

The problem when you use the AuthenticationForm is that init‘s has the first parameter named request. So if you do something like this:

if request.method == 'POST':
    f = AuthenticationForm(request.POST)
    if f.is_valid():
        do_whatever()

You’ll see that the form is not valid, but you won’t get any errors. The explanation is listed in the comments here: http://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/9803, but it’s painful to learn what went wrong.

The right way to use the AuthenticationForm is do this:

if request.method == 'POST':
    f = AuthenticationForm(data=request.POST)
    if f.is_valid():
        do_whatever()

How would I fix this? Instead of doing this:

class AuthenticationForm(forms.Form):
     def __init__(self,request=None, *args, **kwargs):

I would make request be an optional named parameter, and check for it. That’s what the code is doing later on in the clean method anyway.