Week in review: May 14

Here are the highlights of Django improvements this week:

• Changeset 2868: Added CsrfMiddleware to django.contrib.csrf. This new middleware automatically helps protect you from cross-site request forgeries. See the brand-new docs. Thanks, Luke Plant.
• Changeset 2872: The "inspectdb" command no longer puts null=True for TextFields and CharFields. Thanks, mir@noris.de.
• Changeset 2874: Made maxlength overridable for URLField formfield.
• Changeset 2878: Added padding fix to container to address reported admin-site display issues in Safari.
• Changeset 2865: Created a "multi-auth" branch, on which we (Joseph Kocherhans) will be implementing a more flexible authentication framework.
• Changeset 2901: E-mail sent from django.core.mail is now encoded using the value of the DEFAULT_CHARSET setting. Thanks, igor@goryachev.org and akaihola.
• Changeset 2902: QuerySet.count() now respects distinct(). Thanks to Adam Endicott.
• Changeset 2905: Slugifying now collapses consecutive hyphens to a single hyphen. Thanks, Tom Insam.
• Changeset 2906: Improved TemplateSyntaxError to display the original exception if str() of the exception raises an exception in itself. Thanks, Neal Norwitz at Google.

In other Django news:

• To my knowledge, this is the first time Django has been mentioned in a bona-fide book: Django gets the shout out on page 71 of Google Maps Hacks, published by O'Reilly. Today an obscure mention, tomorrow the world!
• Jeff Croft wrote a guide to Django on Dreamhost.
• Zyons is an open-source forum project being developed in Django.
• Another happy customer: "I have to say, my first impressions are that I’m very impressed, particularly with the automatic admin interface generation, and the fact that (gasp) it isn’t a strict MVC framework.
• Wilson, Django's designer (aka the guy who makes us look good), writes about how he uses Django even though he doesn't consider himself a programmer: "How I built a portfolio app in 30 minutes with Django".
• 31 MySpace friends and counting!
• The acronyms keep coming in!

Posted by Adrian Holovaty on May 14, 2006