July 21, 2009
Welcome to the first Django 1.1 release candidate!
This is the third – and likely last – in a series of preview/development releases leading up to the eventual release of Django 1.1, currently scheduled to take place approximately one week after this release candidate. This release is targeted primarily at developers who are interested in trying out new features and testing the Django codebase to help identify and resolve any critical bugs prior to the final 1.1 release.
As such, this release is not yet intended for production use, and any such use is discouraged.
The Django codebase has – with one exception – been in feature freeze since the first 1.1 beta release, and so this release candidate contains only one new feature (see below); work leading up to this release candidate has instead been focused on bugfixing, particularly on the new features introduced prior to the 1.1 beta.
For an overview of those features, consult the Django 1.1 beta release notes.
The 1.1 beta release introduced the ability to use reverse URL resolution with Django’s admin application, which exposed a set of named URLs. Unfortunately, achieving consistent and correct reverse resolution for admin URLs proved extremely difficult, and so one additional feature was added to Django to resolve this issue: URL namespaces.
In short, this feature allows the same group of URLs, from the same application, to be included in a Django URLConf multiple times, with varying (and potentially nested) named prefixes which will be used when performing reverse resolution. For full details, see the documentation on defining URL namespaces.
Due to the changes needed to support this feature, the URL pattern names used when reversing admin URLs have changed since the 1.1 beta release; if you were developing applications which took advantage of this new feature, you will need to update your code to reflect the new names (for most purposes, changing admin_ to admin: in names to be reversed will suffice). For a full list of URL pattern names used by the admin and information on how namespaces are applied to them, consult the documentation on reversing admin URLs.
As of this release candidate, Django 1.1 is in both feature freeze and “string freeze” – all strings marked for translation in the Django codebase will retain their current form in the final Django 1.1 release. Only critical release-blocking bugs will receive attention between now and the final 1.1 release.
If no such bugs are discovered, Django 1.1 will be released approximately one week after this release candidate, on or about July 28, 2009.
In order to provide a high-quality 1.1 release, we need your help. Although this release candidate is, again, not intended for production use, you can help the Django team by trying out this release candidate in a safe testing environment and reporting any bugs or issues you encounter. The Django ticket tracker is the central place to search for open issues:
Please open a new ticket only if no existing ticket corresponds to a problem you’re running into.
Additionally, discussion of Django development, including progress toward the 1.1 release, takes place daily on the django-developers mailing list:
... 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:
Contributions on any level – developing code, writing documentation or simply triaging tickets and helping to test proposed bugfixes – are always welcome and appreciated.
Sep 20, 2009