Django Deprecation Timeline

This document outlines when various pieces of Django will be removed or altered in a backward incompatible way, following their deprecation, as per the deprecation policy. More details about each item can often be found in the release notes of two versions prior.

1.5

See the Django 1.3 release notes for more details on these changes.

  • Starting Django without a SECRET_KEY will result in an exception rather than a DeprecationWarning. (This is accelerated from the usual deprecation path; see the Django 1.4 release notes.)
  • The mod_python request handler will be removed. The mod_wsgi handler should be used instead.
  • The template attribute on Response objects returned by the test client will be removed. The templates attribute should be used instead.
  • The django.test.simple.DjangoTestRunner will be removed. Instead use a unittest-native class. The features of the django.test.simple.DjangoTestRunner (including fail-fast and Ctrl-C test termination) can currently be provided by the unittest-native TextTestRunner.
  • The undocumented function django.contrib.formtools.utils.security_hash will be removed, instead use django.contrib.formtools.utils.form_hmac
  • The function-based generic view modules will be removed in favor of their class-based equivalents, outlined here.
  • The django.core.servers.basehttp.AdminMediaHandler will be removed. In its place use django.contrib.staticfiles.handlers.StaticFilesHandler.
  • The template tags library adminmedia and the template tag {% admin_media_prefix %} will be removed in favor of the generic static files handling. (This is faster than the usual deprecation path; see the Django 1.4 release notes.)
  • The url and ssi template tags will be modified so that the first argument to each tag is a template variable, not an implied string. In 1.4, this behavior is provided by a version of the tag in the future template tag library.
  • The reset and sqlreset management commands will be removed.
  • Authentication backends will need to support an inactive user being passed to all methods dealing with permissions. The supports_inactive_user attribute will no longer be checked and can be removed from custom backends.
  • transform() will raise a GEOSException when called on a geometry with no SRID value.
  • django.http.CompatCookie will be removed in favor of django.http.SimpleCookie.
  • django.core.context_processors.PermWrapper and django.core.context_processors.PermLookupDict will be removed in favor of the corresponding django.contrib.auth.context_processors.PermWrapper and django.contrib.auth.context_processors.PermLookupDict, respectively.
  • The MEDIA_URL or STATIC_URL settings will be required to end with a trailing slash to ensure there is a consistent way to combine paths in templates.
  • django.db.models.fields.URLField.verify_exists will be removed. The feature was deprecated in 1.3.1 due to intractable security and performance issues and will follow a slightly accelerated deprecation timeframe.
  • Translations located under the so-called project path will be ignored during the translation building process performed at runtime. The LOCALE_PATHS setting can be used for the same task by including the filesystem path to a locale directory containing non-app-specific translations in its value.
  • The Markup contrib app will no longer support versions of Python-Markdown library earlier than 2.1. An accelerated timeline was used as this was a security related deprecation.
  • The CACHE_BACKEND setting will be removed. The cache backend(s) should be specified in the CACHES setting.

1.6

See the Django 1.4 release notes for more details on these changes.

  • django.contrib.databrowse will be removed.
  • django.contrib.localflavor will be removed following an accelerated deprecation.
  • django.contrib.markup will be removed following an accelerated deprecation.
  • The compatibility modules django.utils.copycompat and django.utils.hashcompat as well as the functions django.utils.itercompat.all and django.utils.itercompat.any will be removed. The Python builtin versions should be used instead.
  • The csrf_response_exempt and csrf_view_exempt decorators will be removed. Since 1.4 csrf_response_exempt has been a no-op (it returns the same function), and csrf_view_exempt has been a synonym for django.views.decorators.csrf.csrf_exempt, which should be used to replace it.
  • The django.core.cache.backends.memcached.CacheClass backend was split into two in Django 1.3 in order to introduce support for PyLibMC. The historical CacheClass will be removed in favor of django.core.cache.backends.memcached.MemcachedCache.
  • The UK-prefixed objects of django.contrib.localflavor.uk will only be accessible through their GB-prefixed names (GB is the correct ISO 3166 code for United Kingdom).
  • The IGNORABLE_404_STARTS and IGNORABLE_404_ENDS settings have been superseded by IGNORABLE_404_URLS in the 1.4 release. They will be removed.
  • The form wizard has been refactored to use class-based views with pluggable backends in 1.4. The previous implementation will be removed.
  • Legacy ways of calling cache_page() will be removed.
  • The backward-compatibility shim to automatically add a debug-false filter to the 'mail_admins' logging handler will be removed. The LOGGING setting should include this filter explicitly if it is desired.
  • The builtin truncation functions django.utils.text.truncate_words() and django.utils.text.truncate_html_words() will be removed in favor of the django.utils.text.Truncator class.
  • The GeoIP class was moved to django.contrib.gis.geoip in 1.4 – the shortcut in django.contrib.gis.utils will be removed.
  • django.conf.urls.defaults will be removed. The functions include(), patterns() and url() plus handler404, handler500, are now available through django.conf.urls .
  • The functions setup_environ() and execute_manager() will be removed from django.core.management. This also means that the old (pre-1.4) style of manage.py file will no longer work.
  • Setting the is_safe and needs_autoescape flags as attributes of template filter functions will no longer be supported.
  • The attribute HttpRequest.raw_post_data was renamed to HttpRequest.body in 1.4. The backward compatibility will be removed – HttpRequest.raw_post_data will no longer work.
  • The value for the post_url_continue parameter in ModelAdmin.response_add() will have to be either None (to redirect to the newly created object’s edit page) or a pre-formatted url. String formats, such as the previous default '../%s/', will not be accepted any more.

1.7

See the Django 1.5 release notes for more details on these changes.

  • The module django.utils.simplejson will be removed. The standard library provides json which should be used instead.
  • The function django.utils.itercompat.product will be removed. The Python builtin version should be used instead.
  • Auto-correction of INSTALLED_APPS and TEMPLATE_DIRS settings when they are specified as a plain string instead of a tuple will be removed and raise an exception.
  • The mimetype argument to the __init__ methods of HttpResponse, SimpleTemplateResponse, and TemplateResponse, will be removed. content_type should be used instead. This also applies to the render_to_response() shortcut and the sitemamp views, index() and sitemap().
  • When HttpResponse is instantiated with an iterator, or when content is set to an iterator, that iterator will be immediately consumed.
  • The AUTH_PROFILE_MODULE setting, and the get_profile() method on the User model, will be removed.
  • The cleanup management command will be removed. It’s replaced by clearsessions.
  • The daily_cleanup.py script will be removed.
  • The depth keyword argument will be removed from select_related().

2.0

  • django.views.defaults.shortcut(). This function has been moved to django.contrib.contenttypes.views.shortcut() as part of the goal of removing all django.contrib references from the core Django codebase. The old shortcut will be removed in the 2.0 release.
  • ssi and url template tags will be removed from the future template tag library (used during the 1.3/1.4 deprecation period).
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