Django 1.7 alpha 1 released

As part of the Django 1.7 release process, today we've released Django 1.7 alpha 1, a preview/testing package that represents the first stage in the 1.7 release cycle and an opportunity for you to try out some of the changes coming in Django 1.7.

Django 1.7 will bring several major new features to Django, along with a host of other improvements. Highlights include a schema-migration framework, a new validation tool to help identify and fix common errors, a complete refactoring of how Django identifies and loads applications, and support for custom database lookups.

For full details, see the in-development 1.7 release notes.

As with all alpha and beta packages, this is not for production use. But if you'd like to take some of the new features for a spin, or to help find and fix bugs (which should be reported to the issue tracker), you can grab a copy of the alpha package from our downloads page. And as always, signed MD5 and SHA1 checksums of the 1.7 alpha package are available.

In addition to the changes covered in the release notes, there are two already-noted issues to be aware of when using the 1.7 alpha package:

Issue #21856 -- an empty value for the DATABASES setting will cause a crash.

setting will cause a crash. Issue #21831 -- using the contenttypes package or GenericForeignKey will fail unless django.contrib.auth is in INSTALLED_APPS .

Both of these will be fixed prior to the final 1.7 release.

Additionally, users of South (a popular third-party package for schema migrations) should note that South is not compatible with the 1.7 alpha.