How to check if a user is logged in (how to properly use user.is_authenticated)?

Update for Django 1.10+:

is_authenticated is now an attribute in Django 1.10.

The method was removed in Django 2.0.

For Django 1.9 and older:

is_authenticated is a function. You should call it like

if request.user.is_authenticated():
    # do something if the user is authenticated

As Peter Rowell pointed out, what may be tripping you up is that in the default Django template language, you don’t tack on parenthesis to call functions. So you may have seen something like this in template code:

{% if user.is_authenticated %}

However, in Python code, it is indeed a method in the User class.