Django 1.7 release candidate 1

It's almost here!

Tonight we're pleased to announce the first release-candidate package for Django 1.7. This release has been quite a while in the making, and includes several major new features. There's a new built-in schema-migration framework, improved tools for validating and checking your projects, a complete refactor of the way Django identifies and loads your applications, and support for custom database lookups.

And that's just the biggest highlights; for a full rundown of features, see the in-development 1.7 release notes.

As with all pre-release 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 release-candidate package from our downloads page. And as always, signed MD5 and SHA1 checksums of the 1.7 release-candidate package are available.