February 5, 2010
Welcome to Django 1.2 beta 1!
This is the second in a series of preview/development releases leading up to the eventual release of Django 1.2, currently scheduled to take place in March 2010. 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 1.2 release.
As such, this release is not intended for production use, and any such use is discouraged.
This document covers changes since the Django 1.2 alpha release; the 1.2 alpha release notes cover new and updated features in Django between 1.1 and 1.2 alpha.
This beta release deprecates two portions of public API, and introduces a potentially backwards-incompatible change to another. Under our API stability policy, deprecation proceeds over multiple release cycles: initially, the deprecated API will raise PendingDeprecationWarning, followed by raising DeprecationWarning in the next release, and finally removal of the deprecated API in the release after that. APIs beginning the deprecation process in Django 1.2 will be removed in the Django 1.4 release.
Django 1.2 changes the test runner tools to use a class-based approach. Old style function-based test runners will still work, but should be updated to use the new class-based runners.
The django.contrib.syndication.feeds.Feed class is being replaced by the django.contrib.syndication.views.Feed class. The old feeds.Feed class is deprecated. The new class has an almost identical API, but allows instances to be used as views.
Also, in accordance with RSS best practices, RSS feeds will now include an atom:link element. You may need to update your tests to take this into account.
For more information, see the full syndication framework documentation.
Due to cookie-handling bugs in Internet Explorer, Safari, and possibly other browsers, Django’s encoding of cookie values was changed so that the characters comma (‘,’) and semi-colon (‘;’) are treated as non-safe characters, and are therefore encoded as \054 and \073 respectively. This could produce backwards incompatibilities if you are relying on the ability to set these characters directly in cookie values.
This 1.2 beta release marks the final feature freeze for Django 1.2; while most feature development was completed for 1.2 alpha (which constituted a freeze on major features), a few other new features were added afterward and so are new as of 1.2 beta.
A foundation for specifying permissions at the per-object level was added in Django 1.2 alpha but not documented with the alpha release.
The default authentication backends shipped with Django do not currently make use of this, but third-party authentication backends are free to do so. See the authentication docs for more information.
If you provide a custom authentication backend with the attribute supports_anonymous_user set to True, the AnonymousUser class will check the backend for permissions, just as the normal User does. This is intended to help centralize permission handling; apps can always delegate the question of whether something is allowed or not to the authorization/authentication system. See the authentication docs for more details.
Before the final Django 1.2 release, at least one additional preview/development releases will be made available. The current schedule consists of at least the following:
If necessary, additional beta or release-candidate packages will be issued prior to the final 1.2 release. Django 1.2 will be released approximately one week after the final release candidate.
In order to provide a high-quality 1.2 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:
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 1.2 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 1.2 will also be taking place at PyCon US 2010, on the dedicated sprint days (February 22 through 25), 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