For others with this question, here is my summary of what I have learned from https://github.com/divio/django-cms/issues/1798.
There are four potential options:
- If you need your custom user model to have a name other than User, you'll need to wait.
- You can call the custom user model User - though when I tried this, I got errors about clashes with related m2m fields. There are some further details on the above link which may help resolve this.
- Django 1.5 still lets you use user profiles. So if you are ok with using a deprecated feature, you can still use Django-CMS 2.4 and Django 1.5 with user profiles instead of a custom user model. (I misread the Django docs here and thought user profiles were not supported in Django 1.5.)
- You can often get away without either a user profile or a custom user model - they are best used to add data specifically for user authentication. Instead, you can use another model with a one-to-one relationship to User, and use the reverse relationship to access it.
In my case, I am going to go with #3 in the short-run and #4 in the long-run.