Week in review

This week saw our first official release and a host of improvements. Here are the highlights of what happened, in chronological order.

• Revision 1233: Django's 404 and 500 (server error) pages in debug mode are now beautiful and much more informative than before.
• Revision 1247:: Added a direct_to_template generic view, which simply renders a given template and passes it parameters from the URL. See the docs.
• Revision 1249: Added a redirect_to view, which simply redirects to a given page. See the docs.
• Revision 1253: Improved the FormWrapper class so that iteration through formfields is now possible.
• Revision 1258: Changed the django-admin.py startapp command to create a views.py file instead of a views package. This keeps things simpler. Of course, you can still put views inside a views package, or in any other Python module on your Python path.
• Released Django 0.90!
• Revision 1274: Fixed a bug in quoting of the "select" keyword in the database API. Thanks, Hugo.
• Revision 1275: For admin list_display functions without a short_description, Django now converts underscores to spaces. Thanks, Aaron Swartz.
• Revision 1281: Added some handy RSS configurations for the as-of-yet-undocumented comments framework.
• Revision 1291: Beefed up the URLconf docs. Give 'em a read!
• Revision 1296: Changed the flatpages app so that it doesn't throw a 404 exception when DEBUG=True. Thanks, Hugo.
• Revision 1297: Fixed a namespace bug in the new 500 error view. Thanks, rjwittams.
• Revision 1303: Added a SESSION_SAVE_EVERY_REQUEST setting.
• Revision 1313: Fixed the long-standing bug with OneToOneFields.
• Revisions 1314 and 1323: Improved the model validator to validate FloatFields and unique_together, respectively.
• Revision 1326: Fixed a bug in the treatment of underscores and percent signs in the SQLite backend.
• Revision 1327: Improved the password security in the authentication framework. See the weblog entry.

In other Django news:

• Sune Kirkeby improved the XHTMLAsHTMLMiddleware.
• Luke Plant released a Django validator app, which validates the outgoing HTML of every Django-powered page.
• Simon Willison presented Django in front of 200+ people in London. Here's a good writeup.
• As we mentioned in a weblog entry, Snakes and Rubies, a meeting of the minds behind Django and Ruby on Rails, will take place on Dec. 3 in Chicago. Adrian and Jacob (and probably Simon) will be there. We're hoping to videotape it for people who can't make it.
• Bill de hÓra wrote a Django to-do app in 16 minutes.
• Lots of people continue to discover Django and fall in love. Check out the nice words by David Ascher and Luke Plant.
• And there was this gem: "I will migrate my PHP stuff to Django and such frameworks in the future. PHP's braindead decisions by its developers has annoyed me a bit too much by now."

Posted by Adrian Holovaty on November 20, 2005