Call for testing: magic-removal branch

If you've been involved at all in the Django community over the past few months, you're no doubt familiar with a sexy, yet elusive, phenomenon known as the "magic-removal branch." It's a new version of Django, begun a couple of months ago, that makes several sweeping changes to the framework to improve its usability and remove unnecessary "magic."

That branch has been marked as "for developers/hackers only" -- until now. Today we're freezing feature additions to it and encouraging people to start using it as a brief beta test. Come one, come all -- check out magic-removal and let us know if you find any bugs or other issues.

Over the next week, we'll be concentrating on fixing any remaining bugs and -- more importantly -- updating ALL of the documentation. Documentation is one of Django's strongest selling points, and we don't want to risk having inaccurate docs.

We're aiming for a merge to trunk on next Friday, April 28. (For you non-techies, that means we'll convert the main Django code repository to use the magic-removal code and switch all development permanently to that Django code base.) That should give us enough time to work on documentation and iron out last-minute bugs. We should release Django's next official release -- 0.92 -- shortly thereafter, assuming all is well.

The RemovingTheMagic wiki page has all you need to know about the magic-removal branch.

Or, you can just Google for "magic removal". Number one hit, baby! Yes, it's even above this strange magic carpet removal video and a host of Web sites for "magic" stain- and hair-removal products.

Please feel free to ask questions in IRC (#django on irc.freenode.net) or the django-developers mailing list.