Welcome to Django 1.3 beta 1!
This is the second in a series of preview/development releases leading up to the eventual release of Django 1.3. 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 1.3 release.
As such, this release is not intended for production use, and any such use is discouraged.
Django 1.3 ships with a new contrib app django.contrib.staticfiles to help developers handle the static media files (images, CSS, JavaScript, etc.) that are needed to render a complete web page.
The staticfiles app ships with the ability to automatically serve static files during development (if the DEBUG setting is True) when using the runserver management command. Based on feedback from the community this release adds two new options to the runserver command to modify this behavior:
See the staticfiles reference documentation for more details, or learn how to manage static files.
If you would like to give translators hints about a translatable string, you can add a comment prefixed with the Translators keyword on the line preceding the string, e.g.:
def my_view(request):
# Translators: This message appears on the home page only
output = ugettext("Welcome to my site.")
The comment will appear in the resulting .po file and should also be displayed by most translation tools.
For more information, see Comments for translators.
If you provide a custom auth backend with supports_inactive_user set to True, an inactive user model will check the backend for permissions. This is useful for further centralizing the permission handling. See the authentication docs for more details.
The Django admin has long had an undocumented "feature" allowing savvy users to manipulate the query string of changelist pages to filter the list of objects displayed. However, this also creates a security issue, as a staff user with sufficient knowledge of model structure could use this "feature" to gain access to information he or she would not normally have.
As a result, changelist filtering now explicitly validates all lookup arguments in the query string, and permits only fields which are directly on the model, or relations explicitly permitted by the ModelAdmin definition. If you were relying on this undocumented feature, you will need to update your ModelAdmin definitions to whitelist the relations you choose to expose for filtering.
The newly introduced staticfiles app -- which extends Django's abilities to handle static files for apps and projects -- required the additon of two new settings to refer to those files in templates and code, especially in contrast to the MEDIA_URL and MEDIA_ROOT settings that refer to user-uploaded files.
Prior to 1.3 alpha 2 these settings were called STATICFILES_URL and STATICFILES_ROOT to follow the naming scheme for app-centric settings. Based on feedback from the community it became apparent that those settings created confusion, especially given the fact that handling static files is also desired outside the use of the optional staticfiles app.
As a result, we took the following steps to rectify the issue:
In previous version the admin app defined login methods in multiple locations and ignored the almost identical implementation in the already used auth app. A side effect of this duplication was the missing adoption of the changes made in r12634 to support a broader set of characters for usernames.
This release refactors the admin's login mechanism to use a subclass of the AuthenticationForm instead of a manual form validation. The previously undocumented method 'django.contrib.admin.sites.AdminSite.display_login_form' has been removed in favor of a new login_form attribute.
The django.contrib.localflavor application contains collections of code relevant to specific countries or cultures. One such is USStateField, which provides a field for storing the two-letter postal abbreviation of a U.S. state. This field has consistently caused problems, however, because it is often used to store the state portion of a U.S postal address, but not all "states" recognized by the U.S Postal Service are actually states of the U.S. or even U.S. territory. Several compromises over the list of choices resulted in some users feeling the field supported too many locations, while others felt it supported too few.
In Django 1.3 we're taking a new approach to this problem, implemented as a pair of changes:
Additionally, several finer-grained choice tuples are provided which allow mixing and matching of subsets of the U.S. states and territories, and other locations serviced by the U.S. postal system. Consult the django.contrib.localflavor documentation for more details.
The change to USStateField is technically backwards-incompatible for users who expect this field to exclude Armed Forces locations. If you need to support U.S. mailing addresses without Armed Forces locations, see the list of choice tuples available in the localflavor documentation.
Before the final Django 1.3 release, several other 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 1.3 release. Django 1.3 will be released approximately one week after the final release candidate.
In order to provide a high-quality 1.3 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 1.3 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.
May 10, 2012