mercurycomplex

Jacob Kaplan-Moss has started the process of defining the features we will set in the next major version of Django.

• Feature List Voting
• Feature List

The features I'm hoping that make it into 1.1 are;

1. ORM Aggregation Support (ORM-01) - Would reduce the amount of SQL I have to write considerable (The ORM already does a good job at minimising the need for SQL, but this would be the icing on the cake).
2. Batch Editing in the Admin (Admin-01) - Make mass edits achievable in the admin interface with little additional code.
3. Class based generic views (View-01) - Just seems logically.

In other Django news:

• Profiling Django Applications with kcachegrind
• Why the URL template tag sucks

Simon Willison has released a new application for managing schema migrations in Django applications. The new application dmigrations, is currently only available for mySQL although the code has been structured to allow for other database back ends.

The tutorial available online runs through the process of using dmigrations in your own projects

The Django Project has released version 1.0 of the Django Web Development Framework.

The project was released three years ago, and has gone through many iteration of improvements from the ORM (queryset-refactor) the forms module replacing the original manipulators library.

The development team has put considerable effort into the project to guarantee that version is one of (if not the) best web development frameworks available.

The release notes outline what has been added since the last official release

Congratulations to Adrian, Jacob, Simon, Malcolm and the rest of the development team plus the countless others who have contributed to the project.

Jacob put the finishing touches on the restructured documentation for Django this past week. The new documentation available here is much improved. Several areas have been expanded and it is much easier for a beginner and a seasoned Django user to find the information that they are looking.

Along with the documentation, the new beta for Django has also been released. As the blog post says this signals feature freeze with the last major piece being checked into trunk this week (the comments refactor). The comments refactor was part of this years Summer of Code. To see what has changed in the the comments app, check out the fresh documentation.

Other interesting links for relating to Django this week include;

• Persistent Django on Amazon EC2 and EBS - The easy way
• An Introduction to Using CouchDB with Django
• Adding search to a Django site in a snap

Thierry Schellenbach has also posted an interesting blog post making a comparison between the PHP framework Symfony and Django. I have to agree with him that the forms API in Django is one of its shining stars. Although I have to disagree with his remark about the JS and CSS management, managing JS and CSS in particular in code puts limitation on who can edit the JS and CSS references, something that the Django template system is developed to avoid, lowing the barrier of entry which contributions can be made to projects. Remember not all web designers can program (an vice-versa). Read Thierry's Comparison here.

A long time ago, when Adrian was still finalizing the forms API for Django i wrote a quick introduction on how to integrate TinyMCE into the forms API as a custom widget. That was a long time ago (2 years) but the wiki page still the exist but the code there has become a little stale as the forms API has evolved significantly since then (and so has my programming).

Yesterday I received an email from Joost Cassee saying that he had 'extended' my introductory widget and also added some other cool features. It is available from Google Project Hosting. What is really cool is that he has integrated the pyenchant spell checking library (for those stuck with a browser that doesn't have integrated spell checking support).

I much appreciate Joost contacting me and crediting me in the project documentation.

The Django Project has released, the first beta of the upcoming version 1.0 release of Django Project.

This signals the beginning of feature freeze for version 1.0, with the core developers focussing on stablizing Django for an excellent version 1.0.

• Release Announcement
• Release Notes