django-tagging and derivates like django-tagging-ng provide a TagField, which is a CharField expecting comma separated tags. Behind the scenes, this field is parsed and Tag model instances are created and/or linked.
A stripped variant of widget.js, text_widget.js, enables autocompletion for such a field. To make it even easier, a stripped variant of Widget, TextWidget, automates configuration of text_widget.js.
Needless to say, TextWidget and text_widget.js have a structure that is consistent with Widget and widget.js.
It doesn't have many features for now, but feel free to participate to the project on GitHub.
As usual, a working example lives in test_project. in app charfield_autocomplete.
Warning
Note that this feature was added in version 1.0.16, if you have overloaded autocomplete_light/static.html from a previous version then you should make it load autocomplete_light/text_widget.js to get this new feature.
This demonstrates a working usage of TextWidget:
../../autocomplete_light/example_apps/charfield_autocomplete/forms.py
FTR, using the form in the admin is still as easy:
../../autocomplete_light/example_apps/charfield_autocomplete/admin.py
So is registering an Autocomplete for Tag:
../../autocomplete_light/example_apps/charfield_autocomplete/autocomplete_light_registry.py
This demonstrates the models setup used for the above example, using django-taggit, which provides a normal CharField behaviour:
../../autocomplete_light/example_apps/charfield_autocomplete/models.py
For django-taggit, you need autocomplete_light.contrib.taggit_tagfield
<contrib>.