Django 1.3 alpha 1

A few days ago the first alpha of the new Django 1.3 branch finally came out. The release, of course, is intended not for deployment on combat servers, but for testing a new functional, identifying all sorts of bugs "and all that."

The first alpha boasts a small but pleasant improvement in the main functionality, a large number of eliminated errors, as well as several changes that are not compatible with the previous version of Django 1.2.
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New

• Class-based views .
  Now representations can be used as classes with appropriate methods. Inheritance adds a lot of tasty features. Old versions of views will be considered as derivatives of the main base class of views, and therefore can also be easily extended.
  
  
• Logging
  Added a battery with support for standard Python logging module, which makes logging more convenient. Logging
  
  
• Improved handling of statics .
  Together with Django 1.3 there is a new application 'django.contrib.staticfiles' .
  
  
• Support unittest2 .
  The innovations in the unittest2 module were so much liked by the Django developers that they decided to include a copy of the module in the release.
  
  
• Contextual transaction managers .
  Yes.
  
  
• A few more relatively noticeable changes and many no less relatively invisible.

About solutions incompatible with Django 1.2 you can read here .

There are also a few things that Django said (a): "No." The developers opposed:

• mod_python .
  Due to the fact that the development of the server has stopped a long time ago, Django strongly recommends switching from it to mod_wsgi.
  
  
• Function-based generic views .
  Due to the introduction of a new type of views, the following modules will be removed:
  - django.views.generic.create_update
  - django.views.generic.date_based
  - django.views.generic.list_detail
  - django.views.generic.simple
  
  
• And something else .

Release Schedule

• Week of November 29, 2010: First beta.
  
  
• Week of January 10, 2011: Django 1.3 RC 1
  
  
• Week of January 17, 2011: Final Release
  
  

Read more here .