When I declare a derived class that inherits from both a base class and some mixins, I am always tempted to write:

class Derived(Base, Mixin1, Mixin2):
    "Some class"

My reasoning is that Derived is a Base with some Mixin1 and Mixin2 goodness sprinkled on. Generally, that’s fine. The exception is when I want one of the mixins to override a method or attribute that’s defined in Base. Because the Method Resolution Order is left-to-right, then Base’s im­ple­men­ta­tion will always be found first.

To get the desired behavior of the mixin overriding the base, Base should always appear last in the in­her­i­tance list.

from __future__ import print_function

class Useful(object):
    def __init__(self, msg):
        print("{0}: {1}".format(self.__class__.__name__, msg))

    def stuff(self):
        print("useful")

class Mixin(object):
    def stuff(self):
        print("mixin")

class UsefulThenMixin(Useful, Mixin):
    pass

class MixinThenUseful(Mixin, Useful):
    pass

UsefulThenMixin('base first').stuff()
print('')
MixinThenUseful('base last').stuff()

Running yields:

UsefulThenMixin: base first
useful

MixinThenUseful: base last
mixin