I'm incredibly excited about the release of Django 1.2. Looking back, there've been a few moments that turned out to be great inflection points for Django as a project and for our community. The landing of the "magic-removal" branch and the subsequent 0.96 release was the first of these points: we released a vastly improved Django, and our community began to grow by leaps and bounds. And of course the release of Django 1.0 was another such moment: the maturity of Django, and the "1.0" label proudly proclaiming our confidence, really propelled Django forward.

I'm fairly certain that 1.2 will be another such inflection point.

The new features — multiple database support, model validation, vastly improved CSRF protection, improvements to the admin UI — are some of the most hotly anticipated in Django's history. These features will let our users take Django to new levels, and I can't wait to see what y'all will be able to pull off.

Over the next few weeks you'll be treated to articles discussing these new features in depth, many written by the implementors of these features. So as to not steal their thunder, I'll try to look at the big picture of how they all fit together, and how they'll lay the groundwork for Django 1.3, 1.4, and beyond.

Multiple database support is shaping up to be Django 1.2's killer feature. It's been an interesting challenge adding features of this nature: there's a natural tension between the needs of new and small-scale developers — who value simplicity and ease of use above all else — and the increasing number of large-scale Django developers — who need much more control, and hence more complexity.

I think this tension between simplicity and configurability, between ease-of-use and scale, will continue to come up. As Django matures, users will use it to tackle tougher and tougher tasks, and we'll want Django to scale to the challenge. At the same time, though, there'll always be many users new to Django, and if we swamp them with complexity they'll look elsewhere, and our community will stagnate.

In Django's new multiple database support I see that we've walked the line quite closely. I'm proud of the job we've done balancing these competing needs: getting started with Django 1.2 is as easy as ever, but we've vastly expanded the "upper end" of where you'll be able to take Django. It's my hope that we'll be able to strike similar best-of-both-worlds balances.

Beyond features, though, I'm most excited by the changes I'm seeing in our development community. Over the Django 1.2 release cycle we've seen a lot of new blood in our development community. Even better, as existing contributors' time has waned, new developers have stepped up, and work's still getting done.

Much of this new blood came to use via Google's Summer of Code 2009. The year we accepted six projects:

• Multiple database support (Alex Gaynor).
• HTTP and WSGI improvements (Chris Cahoon).
• Improved localization features (Marc Garcia).
• Model validation (Honza Král).
• Test framework additions (Kevin Kubasic).
• Admin UI improvements (Zain Memon).

The program was a smashing success: all of the projects produced good, working code. Some has found its way into Django 1.2, and some will continue to trickle back into trunk over the 1.3 release cycle. Many of these projects were inspired by long-wished-for features, and the work done during the Summer of Code ended up being what we needed to get these features over the finish line.

We've also added a couple of new committers — Jannis Leidel and James Tauber -- and I'd wager that we'll see a few more folks get the commit bit before the final release.

Speaking of that final release — what of it?

The planned release date is March 9, 2010. We're on track for an on-time release... but we'll never make it without your help!

Every release of Django is truly the work of thousands. We need users who can try out our beta releases in test environments and report back to us. If you find bugs, you can report them on our ticket tracker.

Even better, we'd love to have your help fixing bugs. Contributions on any level — developing code, writing documentation or simply triaging tickets and helping to test proposed bugfixes — are always welcome and greatly appreciated.

Django's online documentation includes pointers on how to contribute to Django

We'll also be holding development sprints for Django 1.2 at PyCon US 2010. We'll hold four days of sprints (February 22 - 25), and we'd love to have you join us in person in Atlanta, or virtually in IRC (#django-dev on irc.freenode.net) or on our mailing list

I hope you'll enjoy the rest of the series, and I hope you'll end up as excited about the release of Django 1.2 as I am!