Django Deprecation Timeline
This document outlines when various pieces of Django will be removed or altered
in a backward incompatible way, following their deprecation, as per the
deprecation policy. More details
about each item can often be found in the release notes of two versions prior.
1.5
See the Django 1.3 release notes for more details on
these changes.
- Starting Django without a SECRET_KEY will result in an exception
rather than a DeprecationWarning. (This is accelerated from the usual
deprecation path; see the Django 1.4 release notes.)
- The mod_python request handler will be removed. The mod_wsgi
handler should be used instead.
- The template attribute on Response
objects returned by the test client will be removed.
The templates attribute should be
used instead.
- The django.test.simple.DjangoTestRunner will be removed.
Instead use a unittest-native class. The features of the
django.test.simple.DjangoTestRunner (including fail-fast and
Ctrl-C test termination) can currently be provided by the unittest-native
TextTestRunner.
- The undocumented function
django.contrib.formtools.utils.security_hash will be removed,
instead use django.contrib.formtools.utils.form_hmac
- The function-based generic view modules will be removed in favor of their
class-based equivalents, outlined here.
- The django.core.servers.basehttp.AdminMediaHandler will be
removed. In its place use
django.contrib.staticfiles.handlers.StaticFilesHandler.
- The template tags library adminmedia and the template tag {%
admin_media_prefix %} will be removed in favor of the generic static files
handling. (This is faster than the usual deprecation path; see the
Django 1.4 release notes.)
- The url and ssi template tags will be
modified so that the first argument to each tag is a template variable, not
an implied string. In 1.4, this behavior is provided by a version of the tag
in the future template tag library.
- The reset and sqlreset management commands will be removed.
- Authentication backends will need to support an inactive user
being passed to all methods dealing with permissions.
The supports_inactive_user attribute will no longer be checked
and can be removed from custom backends.
- transform() will raise
a GEOSException when called
on a geometry with no SRID value.
- django.http.CompatCookie will be removed in favor of
django.http.SimpleCookie.
- django.core.context_processors.PermWrapper and
django.core.context_processors.PermLookupDict will be removed in
favor of the corresponding
django.contrib.auth.context_processors.PermWrapper and
django.contrib.auth.context_processors.PermLookupDict, respectively.
- The MEDIA_URL or STATIC_URL settings will be
required to end with a trailing slash to ensure there is a consistent
way to combine paths in templates.
- django.db.models.fields.URLField.verify_exists will be removed. The
feature was deprecated in 1.3.1 due to intractable security and
performance issues and will follow a slightly accelerated deprecation
timeframe.
- Translations located under the so-called project path will be ignored during
the translation building process performed at runtime. The
LOCALE_PATHS setting can be used for the same task by including the
filesystem path to a locale directory containing non-app-specific
translations in its value.
- The Markup contrib app will no longer support versions of Python-Markdown
library earlier than 2.1. An accelerated timeline was used as this was
a security related deprecation.
- The CACHE_BACKEND setting will be removed. The cache backend(s) should be
specified in the CACHES setting.
1.6
See the Django 1.4 release notes for more details on
these changes.
- django.contrib.databrowse will be removed.
- django.contrib.localflavor will be removed following an accelerated
deprecation.
- django.contrib.markup will be removed following an accelerated
deprecation.
- The compatibility modules django.utils.copycompat and
django.utils.hashcompat as well as the functions
django.utils.itercompat.all and django.utils.itercompat.any will
be removed. The Python builtin versions should be used instead.
- The csrf_response_exempt and csrf_view_exempt decorators will
be removed. Since 1.4 csrf_response_exempt has been a no-op (it
returns the same function), and csrf_view_exempt has been a
synonym for django.views.decorators.csrf.csrf_exempt, which should
be used to replace it.
- The django.core.cache.backends.memcached.CacheClass backend
was split into two in Django 1.3 in order to introduce support for
PyLibMC. The historical CacheClass will be removed in favor of
django.core.cache.backends.memcached.MemcachedCache.
- The UK-prefixed objects of django.contrib.localflavor.uk will only
be accessible through their GB-prefixed names (GB is the correct
ISO 3166 code for United Kingdom).
- The IGNORABLE_404_STARTS and IGNORABLE_404_ENDS
settings have been superseded by IGNORABLE_404_URLS in
the 1.4 release. They will be removed.
- The form wizard has been
refactored to use class-based views with pluggable backends in 1.4.
The previous implementation will be removed.
- Legacy ways of calling
cache_page() will be removed.
- The backward-compatibility shim to automatically add a debug-false
filter to the 'mail_admins' logging handler will be removed. The
LOGGING setting should include this filter explicitly if
it is desired.
- The builtin truncation functions django.utils.text.truncate_words()
and django.utils.text.truncate_html_words() will be removed in
favor of the django.utils.text.Truncator class.
- The GeoIP class was moved to
django.contrib.gis.geoip in 1.4 – the shortcut in
django.contrib.gis.utils will be removed.
- django.conf.urls.defaults will be removed. The functions
include(), patterns() and
url() plus handler404,
handler500, are now available through
django.conf.urls .
- The functions setup_environ() and execute_manager() will be removed
from django.core.management. This also means that the old (pre-1.4)
style of manage.py file will no longer work.
- Setting the is_safe and needs_autoescape flags as attributes of
template filter functions will no longer be supported.
- The attribute HttpRequest.raw_post_data was renamed to HttpRequest.body
in 1.4. The backward compatibility will be removed –
HttpRequest.raw_post_data will no longer work.
- The value for the post_url_continue parameter in
ModelAdmin.response_add() will have to be either None (to redirect
to the newly created object’s edit page) or a pre-formatted url. String
formats, such as the previous default '../%s/', will not be accepted any
more.
1.7
See the Django 1.5 release notes for more details on
these changes.
- The module django.utils.simplejson will be removed. The standard library
provides json which should be used instead.
- The function django.utils.itercompat.product will be removed. The Python
builtin version should be used instead.
- Auto-correction of INSTALLED_APPS and TEMPLATE_DIRS settings when they are
specified as a plain string instead of a tuple will be removed and raise an
exception.
- The mimetype argument to the __init__ methods of
HttpResponse,
SimpleTemplateResponse, and
TemplateResponse, will be removed.
content_type should be used instead. This also applies to the
render_to_response() shortcut and
the sitemamp views, index() and
sitemap().
- When HttpResponse is instantiated with an iterator,
or when content is set to an iterator,
that iterator will be immediately consumed.
- The AUTH_PROFILE_MODULE setting, and the get_profile() method on
the User model, will be removed.
- The cleanup management command will be removed. It’s replaced by
clearsessions.
- The daily_cleanup.py script will be removed.
- The depth keyword argument will be removed from
select_related().
2.0
- django.views.defaults.shortcut(). This function has been moved
to django.contrib.contenttypes.views.shortcut() as part of the
goal of removing all django.contrib references from the core
Django codebase. The old shortcut will be removed in the 2.0
release.
- ssi and url template tags will be removed from the future template
tag library (used during the 1.3/1.4 deprecation period).