February 23, 2009
Welcome to Django 1.1 alpha 1!
This is the first in a series of preview/development releases leading up to the eventual release of Django 1.1, currently scheduled to take place in April 2009. This release is primarily targeted at developers who are interested in trying out new features and testing the Django codebase to help identify and resolve bugs prior to the final 1.1 release.
As such, this release is not intended for production use, and any such use is discouraged.
Two major enhancements have been added to Django’s object-relational mapper (ORM):
It’s now possible to run SQL aggregate queries (i.e. COUNT(), MAX(), MIN(), etc.) from within Django’s ORM. You can choose to either return the results of the aggregate directly, or else annotate the objects in a QuerySet with the results of the aggregate query.
This feature is available as new QuerySet.aggregate()`() and QuerySet.annotate()`() methods, and is covered in detail in the ORM aggregation documentation
Queries can now refer to a another field on the query and can traverse relationships to refer to fields on related models. This is implemented in the new F object; for full details, including examples, consult the documentation for F expressions.
Tests written using Django’s testing framework now run dramatically faster (as much as 10 times faster in many cases).
This was accomplished through the introduction of transaction-based tests: when using django.test.TestCase, your tests will now be run in a transaction which is rolled back when finished, instead of by flushing and re-populating the database. This results in an immense speedup for most types of unit tests. See the documentation for TestCase and TransactionTestCase for a full description, and some important notes on database support.
Other new features and changes introduced since Django 1.0 include:
Before Django 1.1 goes final, several other preview/development releases will be made available. The current schedule consists of at least the following:
If deemed necessary, additional alpha, beta or release candidate packages will be issued prior to the final 1.1 release.
In order to provide a high-quality 1.1 release, we need your help. Although this alpha release is, again, not intended for production use, you can help the Django team by trying out the alpha 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:
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 1.1 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.
Development sprints for Django 1.1 will also be taking place at PyCon US 2009, on the dedicated sprint days (March 30 through April 2), and anyone who wants to help out is welcome to join in, either in person at PyCon or virtually in the IRC channel or on the mailing list.
Dec 23, 2012