Geodjango with Geonames

I would like to implement a location based search, based on the geonames zip code dump. For that, I want to use geodjango, but I have no idea how to implement the geonames data for lookup. I don't want to use an external webservice.

Maybe someone already has realized that and has some inspirations for me?

http://geodjango.org/hg/geonames/

Looks like somebody ported this to django 1.2.1:

https://github.com/ramusus/django-geonames

haven't tried it myself yet, but it's on my list.