This one's for Malcolm

Earlier this year, the Django community lost a member, a developer and a friend; Malcolm Tredinnick was a long-time contributor to many open-source projects, including Django, where he served as a committer from 2006 onward. More importantly, he was a brilliant mind, a beloved and respected member of our community, a patient mentor and a dear friend. The news of his passing, in March of this year, was a shock to the Django community and to everyone who'd known and worked with him over the years. He is and will long continue to be missed.

Django 1.6 is dedicated to Malcolm, and the DSF has additionally created the Malcolm Tredinnick Memorial Prize, to be given to a community member who best exemplifies the spirit of what Malcolm brought to our community. The inaugural award was made on November 4.

Django 1.6

As always, the release notes cover all of the new features and improvements in detail, but here are some of the highlights:

• Django 1.6 simplifies the default project and application templates, turning on clickjacking protection and the admin interface by default.
• Django 1.6 overhauls Django's transaction handling, and now enables database-level autocommit by default. This involves some deprecations, so please be sure to read the notes about migrating from 1.5-style transaction handling.
• Django 1.6 supports persistent database connections. Note that this is not the same as connection pooling; this simply allows connections to live (for a configurable time) across requests handled by the same worker.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg; again, for full details, see the release notes.

You can get Django 1.6 right now from our downloads page (along with checksums), or from your favorite Python package manager. Django 1.6 is also the first release series to have a wheel package available; you can still use the .tar.gz if you like (and it's the default), but if you're feeling adventurous and want the benefits of the wheel you can get it from our PyPI page or directly from djangoproject.com.

Django 1.4.10

Also today, we're releasing Django 1.4.10, a bugfix release in the 1.4 series. Django 1.4.10 resolves a Python 2.5 compatibility bug which was present in Django 1.4.9, released last month.

Django 1.4 is also available from our downloads page (listed in the sidebar, along with its checksums), and on PyPI.