being an newbie to django and stumbling over this somewhat older thread i found a differing solution for the problem of dynamically (=override a custom default only if needed) setting the next-param that i'd like to share (working fine with django 1.5, earlier versions untested):
just as django-d i wanted avoid repetition and a custom login-view, so i used the stock django.contrib.auth.views.login-view by adding the line of
url(r'^login/$', 'django.contrib.auth.views.login', {'template_name': 'myapp/login.html',}, name='login'),
to my urls.py and within the login.html-templates form-element:
{% if not next or not next.strip %}
{# avoid django.contrib.auth.views.login s default of /account/profile/ #}
{% url 'afterlogindefaultview' as next %}
{% endif %}
<input type="hidden" name="next" value="{{ next }}" />
which to my understanding follows the decoupling-practice of the url-configurations from the views.
so for views that should redirect to my apps login and afterwards head to a non-default view
i use
return HttpResponseRedirect('%s?next=%s' % (reverse('login'), reverse('mycustomnext')) )
from the view where i want to have the user to log in. i use this to get back to the view where i left off for logging the user in.