What’s new in Django 1.0 beta 1¶

Django’s development trunk has been the site of nearly constant activity over the past year, with several major new features landing since the 0.96 release. For features which were new as of Django 1.0 alpha 1, see the 1.0 alpha 1 release notes. For features which were new as of Django 1.0 alpha 2, see the 1.0 alpha 2 release notes.

This beta release does not contain any major new features, but does include several smaller updates and improvements to Django:

Generic relations in forms and admin

Classes are now included in django.contrib.contenttypes which can be used to support generic relations in both the admin interface and in end-user forms. See the documentation for generic relations for details.

Improved flexibility in the admin

Following up on the refactoring of Django’s administrative interface (django.contrib.admin), introduced in Django 1.0 alpha 1, two new hooks have been added to allow customized pre- and post-save handling of model instances in the admin. Full details are in the admin documentation.

INSERT/UPDATE distinction

Although Django’s default behavior of having a model’s save() method automatically determine whether to perform an INSERT or an UPDATE at the SQL level is suitable for the majority of cases, there are occasional situations where forcing one or the other is useful. As a result, models can now support an additional parameter to save() which can force a specific operation. Consult the database API documentation for details and important notes about appropriate use of this parameter.

Split CacheMiddleware

Django’s CacheMiddleware has been split into three classes: CacheMiddleware itself still exists and retains all of its previous functionality, but it is now built from two separate middleware classes which handle the two parts of caching (inserting into and reading from the cache) separately, offering additional flexibility for situations where combining these functions into a single middleware posed problems. Full details, including updated notes on appropriate use, are in the caching documentation.

Removal of deprecated features

A number of features and methods which had previously been marked as deprecated, and which were scheduled for removal prior to the 1.0 release, are no longer present in Django. These include imports of the form library from django.newforms (now located simply at django.forms), the form_for_model and form_for_instance helper functions (which have been replaced by ModelForm) and a number of deprecated features which were replaced by the dispatcher, file-uploading and file-storage refactorings introduced in the Django 1.0 alpha releases. A full list of these and all other backwards-incompatible changes is available on the Django wiki.

A number of other improvements and bugfixes have also been included: some tricky cases involving case-sensitivity in differing MySQL collations have been resolved, Windows packaging and installation has been improved and the method by which Django generates unique session identifiers has been made much more robust.

The Django 1.0 roadmap¶

One of the primary goals of this beta release is to focus attention on the remaining features to be implemented for Django 1.0, and on the bugs that need to be resolved before the final release. Following this release, we’ll be conducting a series of development sprints building up to the release-candidate stage, followed soon after by Django 1.0. The timeline is projected to be:

• August 15, 2008: Sprint (based in Austin, Texas, USA, and online).
• August 17, 2008: Sprint (based in Tel Aviv, Israel, and online).
• August 21, 2008: Django 1.0 release candidate 1. At this point, all strings marked for translation within Django’s codebase will be frozen, to provide contributors time to check and finalize all of Django’s bundled translation files prior to the final 1.0 release.
• August 22, 2008: Sprint (based in Portland, Oregon, USA, and online).
• August 26, 2008: Django 1.0 release candidate 2.
• August 30, 2008: Sprint (based in London, England, UK, and online).
• September 2, 2008: Django 1.0 final release. The official Django 1.0 release party will take place during the first-ever DjangoCon, to be held in Mountain View, California, USA, September 6-7.

Of course, like any estimated timeline, this is subject to change as requirements dictate. The latest information will always be available on the Django project wiki:

http://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/VersionOneRoadmap

What you can do to help¶

In order to provide a high-quality 1.0 release, we need your help. Although this beta release is, again, not intended for production use, you can help the Django team by trying out the beta codebase in a safe test environment and reporting any bugs or issues you encounter. The Django ticket tracker is the central place to search for open issues:

http://code.djangoproject.com/timeline

Please open new tickets if no existing ticket corresponds to a problem you’re running into.

Additionally, discussion of Django development, including progress toward the 1.0 release, takes place daily on the django-developers mailing list:

http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers

...and in the #django-dev IRC channel on irc.freenode.net. If you’re interested in helping out with Django’s development, feel free to join the discussions there.

Django’s online documentation also includes pointers on how to contribute to Django:

contributing to Django

Contributions on any level – developing code, writing documentation or simply triaging tickets and helping to test proposed bugfixes – are always welcome and appreciated.