Django 1.7 beta 1 released

As part of the Django 1.7 release process, today we've released Django 1.7 beta 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 beta package from our downloads page. And as always, signed MD5 and SHA1 checksums of the 1.7 beta package are available.

Please note also that Django 1.7 is now feature-frozen; from here until the final 1.7 release, no new feature work will be accepted in the 1.7 branch, only bugfixes and translation updates.