Question

I’ve got a website done in Django 0.96 (done in 2007), and now we are thinking about rebuilding it (not just migrating) for Django 1.2 .

Can anyone point me to the new (and worth the while) widgets, plugins and other stuff for Django 1.2 (released in april 2010).

I’ve heard of “South” and of a widget for debugging (can’t remember the name), but I’m a little lost here.

Answer 1

The Django API is amazingly stable so you may not have to rewrite it at all (unless you really want to).

I have a site I did in 2007 using 0.97-pre — at least I think that’s what they called it, it was trunk 6688. Anyway, I have ported the site twice, once to 1.0 and then to 1.1.1. The only “major” thing we had to deal with was Admin moving into its own file, but that was mostly cut-and-paste in the editor plus a few tweaks. You’ll run into small stuff like maxlength going to max_length, etc., but that’s easy stuff to deal with.

Check the lists of Backward Incompatible Changes, and here, and here to see if anything jumps out at you. Read through the ORM docs as if you’ve never seen them before — a lot has changed. You may want to look at some of your model relationships and queries and see if the revised ORM makes some of them easier/more efficient to do.

I recommend using Grappelli along with Filebrowser (in fact I think the recent releases of filebrowser require grappelli). Take a look at Pinax for a whole bushel basket of apps brought together under one roof. There’s a lot out there and you sort of have to poke around a little. Depending on what you’re doing, GeoDjango may be of interest to you. Etc., etc. I’m sure you’ll have fun with all of the new toys.