Week in review

Here are the highlights of Django improvements this week, in chronological order. There were quite a few big improvements; momentum has never been better, and things are moving very quickly!

• Revision 1331 -- The static.serve view no longer opens files in text mode (which was a Windows bug). Thanks, Eugene.
• Revision 1349 -- Added an {% include %} template tag, which lets you include other templates. See the full documentation. Thanks, Robert Wittams.
• Revision 1351 -- Changed debug views to use text/html mime-type instead of DEFAULT_CONTENT_TYPE. Thanks, Sune.
• Revision 1354 -- Added The "contrib" add-ons documentation.
• Revision 1355 -- The middleware loader now throws a better error for a MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES value without a dot. Thanks, Noah Slater.
• Revision 1374 -- The timesince utility (and accompanying template tag) now supports microseconds. Thanks, Aaron Swartz.
• Revision 1376 -- Added better error handling for trailing periods in URLconf include()s.
• Revision 1379 -- Added pretty template errors. See the weblog entry. Thanks, Robert.
• Revision 1400 -- Added a "Template-loader postmortem" section on pretty debug pages when TemplateDoesNotExist is raised. Thanks for the idea, David Ascher.
• Revision 1402 -- Fixed Windows-specific path bug in static.serve view. Thanks, Thanks, Petar Marić and nesh.
• Revision 1410 -- Added template tag decorators simple_tag and inclusion_tag, which make it easy to create custom tags. Thanks, Robert.
• Revision 1428 -- Added an AUTHORS file, which is inevitably incomplete.
• Revision 1429 -- Fixed bug when doing django-admin.py sqlclear with SQLite. Thanks, ye7cakf02.
• Revision 1434 -- Merged the new-admin branch! This essentially makes it easy to customize the admin and reuse parts of it in your own apps. Look for more information in an upcoming blog entry.
• Revision 1438 -- Made a more helpful error for a list_filter error. Thanks, Tom Tobin.
• Revision 1440 -- Added a "login_url" argument to the user_passes_test view decorator. See the docs.
• Revision 1442 -- Made the WSGI handler tolerant of no QUERY_STRING in os.environ. Thanks, michael.mcewan.
• Revision 1443 -- Made the template system scoped to the parser instead of the template module. Also changed the way tags/filters are registered and added support for multiple arguments to {% load %} tag. This is a backwards-incompatible change for people who have created custom template tags or filters. See the backwards-incompatible changes page for upgrade information.
• Revision 1454 -- Added How to serve static files documentation.
• Revision 1470 -- URLconf regex captures no longer have to be named groups -- you can use simple parenthesis rather than named groups. Old URLconfs (with named groups) still work. See the docs. This is backwards-incompatible if you've defined custom middleware with a process_view function. See the backwards-incompatible changes page for upgrade information.
• Revision 1474 -- Added optional arguments to "django-admin.py createsuperuser", so you can create users noninteractively in shell scripts. Thanks for the patch, bjorn.

In other Django news:

• A couple more Django jobs have been advertised. There's this one in San Diego, California, and this one in Dallas, Texas.
• James Bennett has written some fantastic instructions for setting up Django on TextDrive.
• Hugo put together an Ajax heatmap using Django.

Posted by Adrian Holovaty on November 27, 2005