February 15^th, 2008

I still get a lot of traffic from my post Django 0.95 has unicode problems, too, but a lot has changed since then. So I'll try and give a short overview:

While Django-0.96.1, the current stable version, has no real integrated Unicode support, the Unicode-branch was merged into Trunk on the July, 4^th 2008 in changeset 5609. With that patch Django gained full Unicode support and it also is finally possible to use legacy databases. There's an ongoing discussion about allowing UTF-8 characters in usernames on the developer mailing-list in Django's authentication. Also a lot of "general functionality that's necessary for a real website"-patches have become available over the 12 months:

• FileFields and ImageFields now work as expected in newforms since changeset 5819

• There's a pretty stable patch for large file uploads available that passes all tests, but has not been committed yet in ticket 2070

The newforms-admin branch that aims to align Django's excellent administration application with the newforms library tracks Trunk pretty closely and Michael Trier has a screencast that shows how to convert an application to newforms-admin, so that might also be a good place to start if you want to use the newforms-admin application.

The GeoDjango branch that integrates Django's ORM with GIS support also seems to have become quite stable and was recently featured on the excellent This Week In Django podcast #8. This Podcast by Michael Trier has replaced the "This week in Django"-posts on the Django weblog. I liked "reading the news" better, but Michael does an excellent job, so tracking this Podcast is important if you're serious about using Django!

So there you have it :-), things have come a long way since 2006. Even more information can be found in the excellent (and freely available) Django book.