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Django 1.0 alpha release notes

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Welcome to Django 1.0 alpha!

This is the first in a series of preview/development releases leading

up to the eventual release of Django 1.0, currently scheduled to take

place in early September 2008. This release is primarily targeted at

developers who are interested in testing the Django codebase and

helping to identify and resolve bugs prior to the final 1.0 release.

As such, this release is *not* intended for production use, and any

such use is strongly discouraged.

What's new in Django 1.0 alpha

==============================

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. Some of the highlights include:

Refactored admin application (newforms-admin)

    The Django administrative interface (``django.contrib.admin``) has

    been completely refactored; admin definitions are now completely

    decoupled from model definitions (no more ``class Admin``

    declaration in models!), rewritten to use Django's new

    form-handling library (introduced in the 0.96 release as

    ``django.newforms``, and now available as simply ``django.forms``)

    and redesigned with extensibility and customization in mind. Full

    documentation for the admin application is available online in the

    official Django documentation:

        :doc:`admin reference </ref/contrib/admin/index>`

Improved Unicode handling

    Django's internals have been refactored to use Unicode throughout;

    this drastically simplifies the task of dealing with

    non-Western-European content and data in Django. Additionally,

    utility functions have been provided to ease interoperability with

    third-party libraries and systems which may or may not handle

    Unicode gracefully. Details are available in Django's

    Unicode-handling documentation:

         :doc:`unicode reference </ref/unicode>`

An improved Django ORM

    Django's object-relational mapper -- the component which provides

    the mapping between Django model classes and your database, and

    which mediates your database queries -- has been dramatically

    improved by a massive refactoring. For most users of Django this

    is backwards-compatible; the public-facing API for database

    querying underwent a few minor changes, but most of the updates

    took place in the ORM's internals. A guide to the changes,

    including backwards-incompatible modifications and mentions of new

    features opened up by this refactoring, is available on the Django

    wiki:

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

Automatic escaping of template variables

    To provide improved security against cross-site scripting (XSS)

    vulnerabilities, Django's template system now automatically

    escapes the output of variables. This behavior is configurable,

    and allows both variables and larger template constructs to be

    marked as safe (requiring no escaping) or unsafe (requiring

    escaping). A full guide to this feature is in the documentation

    for the :ttag:`autoescape` tag.

There are many more new features, many bugfixes and many enhancements

to existing features from previous releases. The ``newforms`` library,

for example, has undergone massive improvements including several

useful add-ons in ``django.contrib`` which complement and build on

Django's form-handling capabilities, and Django's file-uploading

handlers have been refactored to allow finer-grained control over the

uploading process as well as streaming uploads of large files.

Along with these improvements and additions, we've made a number of

of backwards-incompatible changes to the framework, as features have been

fleshed out and APIs have been finalized for the 1.0 release. A

complete guide to these changes will be available as part of the final

Django 1.0 release, and a comprehensive list of backwards-incompatible

changes is also available on the Django wiki for those who want to

begin developing and testing their upgrade process:

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

The Django 1.0 roadmap

======================

One of the primary goals of this alpha 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 sprints building up to a

series of beta releases and a release-candidate stage, followed soon

after by Django 1.0. The timeline is projected to be:

* August 1, 2008: Sprint (based in Washington, DC, and online).

* August 5, 2008: Django 1.0 beta 1 release. This will also constitute

  the feature freeze for 1.0. Any feature to be included in 1.0 must

  be completed and in trunk by this time.

* August 8, 2008: Sprint (based in Lawrence, KS, and online).

* August 12, 2008: Django 1.0 beta 2 release.

* August 15, 2008: Sprint (based in Austin, TX, and online).

* August 19, 2008: Django 1.0 release candidate 1.

* August 22, 2008: Sprint (based in Portland, OR, and online).

* August 26, 2008: Django 1.0 release candidate 2.

* 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, CA, 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 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:

    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:

    :doc:`contributing to Django </internals/contributing>`

Contributions on any level -- developing code, writing

documentation or simply triaging tickets and helping to test proposed

bugfixes -- are always welcome and appreciated.