Django 1.2 A Look At What’s New

Django 1.2 recently came out and with it came a lot of new features.  New releases are always exciting, especially with a great framework like django, so lets take a look some of the new bells and whistles.

Python Compatibility

This is the first release of django that will stop supporting python 2.3.  It’s an understandable move really since python 3 is out now and they have to be moving in that direction eventually.  Maybe this will be motivation for some to update their legacy apps.

CSRF protection

Cross-Site Request Forgery is a bad thing and it’s good news hearing that they have beefed up the protection against it.  CSRF happens when someone uses nefarious means to perform an action on a website using the credentials of a signed in user.

New Messages framework

The new message framework now supports sessions and cookies which will allow you to display a message for one request to an anonymous or signed in user.

Multiple Databases

You can now use multiple databases in your django project.

E-mail back-ends

You can now choose how django sends email instead of using the default smtp. They have also added the ability to send emails to a file, the console, memory or just throw them away.  This is a going to be great for testing out your new apps email system.

If Tags

You can now do comparison via the template if tag.  The new comparison operators are pretty exciting as I have personally been wanting this functionality for some time.

These are just a few of the new features, mostly ones I was personally excited about.  If you haven’t yet, grab the new version of django and start playing around.