I was thinking that another option would be to decouple the INSTALLED_APPS setting from the data store to allow for future changes (such as a better place to store app-specific settings than the global namespace as CAPS_NAMES in the settings file), similar to the patterns() and include() functions of URLconf. Something like:
INSTALLED_APPS = ( app('django.contrib.admin'), app('myapp.admin', as_='myadmin'), ) Like I said, this could allow for future compatibility with things like static_url= or other application-specific settings.