What I'm excited about in Django 1.1

This past week, Jacob Kaplan-Moss put together the list of all of the features proposed for Django 1.1, and began to solicit comments on them. This is going to be a list of features I’m excited about.

• Making admin URLs reversable. Currently the Django Admin uses a bit of a convulted scheme to route URLs. The proposal is to have them work using the current URL scheme. This is something I’ve been working on for a while, and hoping to see it to completion.
• Comment-utils inclusion. The proposal is to include the moderation level features from comment-utils in Django. I think this is a great idea, and can’t wait to see what sort of spam check schemes people implement once moderation facilities are included.
• Message passing for anonymous users. This is basically session level message passing. This is something I’ve had to implement in past, so I’m looking forward to this.
• ORM aggregation, as part of the Google Summer of Code Nicolas Lara, mentored by Russell Keith-Magee, implemented this. I love the API design, and it’s a hugely requested feature, I can’t wait to point new users to the docs, rather than explaining to them that it’s coming soon.
• ORM expression support, this work was also done by Nicolas Lara, and will let you do things like Model.objects.filter(height__gt=F(‘width’)), or Model.objects.update(salary = F(‘salary’)*1.2).
• Model Validation, before 1.0 I implemented unique, and unique_together checks for model forms. That’s pretty much a massive special case of this.
• Class-based generic views, often one of the first things a new user to Django will learn to do is create a view that simply wraps a generic view, in order to do some custom filtering on a queryset. This is a great solution for that usecase, however as users want to inject more and more flexibility into a generic view it can lead to a huge number of settings. Rather than this, subclassing a generic view could provide a nice clean solution.

These will all be great features, and there are many more proposed(you can see them all here), however these features only happen because people write code for them. If there’s a feature you’re excited about, or interested in making a reality, try to contribute to it, even if it’s just writing some unit tests.