Django Project: Announcing Django 0.96!

Fri, 23 Mar 2007 21:48:17 +0000

We're incredibly pleased to announce the release of Django 0.96!

The primary goal for 0.96 was a cleanup and stabilization of the features introduced in 0.95. The release notes cover the few backwards-incompatible changes, but for most people the upgrade process should be simple.

One particular change affects users of MySQL on older servers: If you get an error about Django requiring a newer version of MySQLdb, you'll need to either upgrade MySQLdb to 1.2.1p2 or later, or switch your DATABASE_ENGINE setting to "mysql_old". You can read more about this change in the release notes.

Though the main focus of 0.96 is stability and maturity, it also includes some juicy new features to help you write even better code. Of particular note:

Django now ships with a comprehensive set of testing tools. You can write tests based on doctest or unittest, test your views with a simple test harness, and load initial data ("fixtures") automatically.

If testing is indeed like flossing, think of these new tools as super-comfortable, deliciously flavored, top-of-the-line thread.
Django 0.96 also ships with a brand new forms library, django.newforms. This is a replacement for django.forms, the old forms/manipulator/validation framework. Both APIs are available in 0.96, but over the next two releases we're going to switch completely to this awesome new system.

Read the release notes for more details on these and other changes.

We can't possible thank our amazing development community enough. This release contains the work of over 200 different people. To put this in perspective: when we released 0.95 we thanked "the dozens of Django contributors"; this time, it would be more appropriate to thank hundreds of contributors. In other words, this release wouldn't have happened without this amazing community.

To everyone who's reported a bug, submitted a patch, participated on our mailing lists, hung out in our IRC channel: our most heartfelt thanks. As always, We try (but inevitably fail) to list everybody in the AUTHORS file.

So, what are you waiting for? Go download 0.96, and let us know what you think!

Planet MVC / Django

Django Project: Announcing Django 0.96!