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+================================
+Django 1.0 alpha release notes
+================================
+
+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.