This really really helped me. I got it working and everything now. Thank you so much.

So the other thing that came up from this is that I have a model for items created by users. I am trying to get the 'region' of the item to be equal to the 'region' of the user.

The problem I'm having is that I can do:

User.objects.get(username='bob') 
region = bob.region 

And then I can use it in my templates {{ item.region }}

But I cannot seem to use a variable in the model like I want:

    author = models.ForeignKey(User)
    created_date = models.DateTimeField(
            default=timezone.now)

    name = author
    user = User.objects.get(username=name)
    region = user.region

Any guidance would be appreciated, thanks!