Django 1.5 released

It's here!

After quite a lot of work, today we're proud to announce the release of Django 1.5. As always, the release notes cover all the good stuff in detail, but since this is a pretty big release let's take a look at some of the highlights:

Django 1.5 introduces support for a configurable User model. The basic Django User model is still around, of course, but now there's first-class support for specifying your own model and having Django's auth system make use of it.

Django 1.5 is the first Django release with support for Python 3 (specifically, Python 3.2 and newer). Python 3 support is still considered experimental -- largely because it hasn't received as much real-world testing as we'd like -- but a Python 3 porting guide is available if you'd like to give it a try, and we will be considering Python 3 compatibility bugs to be blockers for future releases. Of course, if you're still comfortable with Python 2, Django continues to offer support for that just as we always have -- though note that the minimum version for Django 1.5 is Python 2.6.5, and Python 2.7.3 or newer is strongly recommended.

Django's documentation has also gotten some pretty significant work; the main documentation page has had a bit of a facelift to make things easier to find, the existing tutorial got some refurbishing, and several new tutorials -- including some more advanced topics, like writing an app you can reuse in multiple projects -- have been added. And the documentation for class-based views has been significantly expanded, which should make this feature a lot easier to understand and take advantage of.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg; Django 1.5 has a whole lot more to offer, all of which is covered in the release notes.

Meanwhile, Django 1.5 itself is available from our downloads page (see also: checksums for package verification), or from your favorite Python package manager.

Finally, as always we want to point out that we couldn't do this without the help of huge numbers of people from around the world; the Django community grows every day, and the number of people who've contributed to Django grows with every release. You're both the reason we do this, and the reason why we can do this, so give yourselves all a big pat on the back.