And example of how I deal with automatically registering tastypie resources for the urlconf

discovery.py

# PROJECT/base.lib.discovery
#

from functools import wraps
import traceback
import sys


registry = {}

def autodiscover(submodule_name=None, variables=None, callback=None):
    """
    Auto-discover INSTALLED_APPS {submodule_name}.py modules and fail silently when
    not present.
    """

    import copy
    from django.conf import settings
    from django.utils.importlib import import_module
    from django.utils.module_loading import module_has_submodule
    registry = {}
    before_import_registry = None
    pointless_error_message = "No module named {}".format(submodule_name)
    
    for app in settings.INSTALLED_APPS:
        mod = import_module(app)
        # Attempt to import the app's submodule.
        try:
            before_import_registry = copy.copy(registry)
            path = '{app}.{submodule}'.format(
                app=app,
                submodule=submodule_name)
            module = import_module(path)

            if not variables == None:
                if isinstance(variables, str):
                    if "," in variables:
                        variables = variables.split(",")
                    else:
                        variables = (variables, )

                available_variables = ( getattr(module, variable, None) for variable in variables )
                callback(*available_variables)

        except Exception as error :
            if not pointless_error_message in error.message:
                print path
                print traceback.format_exc()
            # Reset the model registry to the state before the last import as
            # this import will have to reoccur on the next request and this
            # could raise NotRegistered and AlreadyRegistered exceptions
            # (see #8245).

            registry = before_import_registry

            # Decide whether to bubble up this error. If the app just
            # doesn't have an admin module, we can ignore the error
            # attempting to import it, otherwise we want it to bubble up.
            if module_has_submodule(mod, submodule_name):
                raise

resources.py

# myapp.api.resources
#

from tastypie.resources import ModelResource
from an_imaginary_app_that_has_things  import models


class ThingResource(ModelResource):
    class Meta:
        queryset = models.Thing.objects.all()


enabled_resources = [
    ThingResource,
]

settings.py

# PROJECT/base.settings
#

#...

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    #...
    'base',
    'myapp',
    #...
)

#...

urls.py

# PROJECT/base.urls
#

from base.lib.discovery import autodiscover

v1_api = Api(api_name='v1')


def register_resources(resources=None):
    if not resources is None:
        for resource in resources:
            v1_api.register(resource())

autodiscover('api.resources', 'enabled_resources', register_resources)


urlpatterns = patterns('',
    surl(r'^api/', include(v1_api.urls)),
)