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+Upgrading to Django 1.6
+#######################
+
+:date: 2013-12-29 18:00
+:tags: Django
+:slug: upgrading-to-django-1.6
+:author: Brian Neal
+
+Getting started
+===============
+
+`Django`_ 1.6 came out recently, which was soon followed by 1.6.1, and it looks
+like 1.6.2 is on the way. I finally got around to upgrading two of my largest
+sites. I thought I would make a list of what I changed at a high level for my
+own reference. Perhaps someone else may find it useful as well.
+
+In any event, I highly recommend you read the excellent `release notes`_ and
+`deprecation timeline`_. The changes in 1.6 didn't seem groundbreaking, but
+they were numerous. I spent a lot of time reading through the notes and trying
+to decide if the issues affected me or not.
+
+I recommend you run with warnings turned on::
+
+   $ python -Wall manage.py runserver
+
+This will help you flag down issues in your code. If you aren't sure where
+a warning is coming from, you can turn warnings into exceptions and get
+a traceback (see the Python docs on the warnings_ library). Another trick is to
+put a pdb_ breakpoint in the Django code before or after the warning, then you
+can examine the call stack with the ``w`` command.
+
+Upgrade Issues
+==============
+
+Here are the issues that I ran into. Of course you may have a very different
+experience depending on what features of Django you used and the details of
+your site.
+
+#. The location of the ``XViewMiddleware`` changed. I had to update my
+   ``MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES`` setting as a result. 
+#. Various ``get_query_set`` to ``get_queryset`` changes. The Django developers
+   have ironed out some naming inconsistencies in method names on both model
+   managers and ``ModelAdmin`` classes. 
+#. In template / form processing, the ``label_tag`` now includes the
+   ``label_suffix``. I noticed this when I saw that I had two colons on a form
+   field's label.
+#. One very nice change that I am please to see is that Django now does test
+   discovery just like the unittest_ module in the standard library. To take
+   advantage of this I renamed all my test modules from ``view_tests.py`` to
+   ``test_views.py``, for example. This also let me get rid of ``import``
+   statements in various ``__init__.py`` files in test subdirectories. In other
+   words, you no longer have to have silly lines like
+   ``from view_tests import *`` in your test packages' ``__init__.py`` files.
+#. Django now supports database connection persistence. To take advantage of
+   this you need to set the CONN_MAX_AGE_ setting to a non-zero value.
+#. The ``CACHE_MIDDLEWARE_ANONYMOUS_ONLY`` setting is now deprecated and can be
+   removed. For various reasons explained in the notes this never really worked
+   right anyway.
+#. Updated to version 1.0 of the django-debug-toolbar_. The version I was using
+   would not work in Django 1.6. It is so good to see that this project is
+   being actively maintained again. There are several new panels and neat
+   features, check it out!
+#. You now get a warning if you have a ``ModelForm`` without an ``exclude`` or
+   ``fields`` meta option. This is rather nice as I have been bit by this in
+   the past when a form suddenly started showing a newly added field that it
+   should not have. I added a ``fields`` option to a ``ModelForm`` as a result.
+   Unfortunately some third party applications I am using have this problem as
+   well.
+#. The ``cycle`` tag has new XSS_ protection. To make use of it now, you have
+   to add a ``{% load cycle from future %}`` tag into your templates.
+#. The ``django.contrib.auth`` password reset function is now using base 64 encoding of the
+   ``User`` primary key. The details are `here <https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.6/releases/1.6/#django-contrib-auth-password-reset-uses-base-64-encoding-of-user-pk>`_. This affected me 
+   because I am using a custom password reset URL, and thus I needed to update
+   my URL pattern for both the new parameter name and the regular expression
+   for base 64. I missed this originally and I started getting 404's on my
+   password reset confirmation URLs. And yes, this is something I should have a
+   test for!
+
+What I didn't do
+================
+
+Many of the warnings that I got came from third party modules that I have not
+updated in a long time, including Celery_ and Haystack_. I am going to have to
+schedule some time to update to the latest versions of these apps. Hopefully
+the warnings will be fixed in the newer versions, but if not I can write
+tickets or possibly submit patches / pull requests. This is the price of
+progress I suppose.
+
+I also use a couple of smaller third party applications that seem to be no
+longer maintained. These apps are now generating some warnings. I'll have to
+fork them and fix these myself. Luckily these projects are on GitHub so this
+should not be a problem.
+
+Finally I am still facing the problem of what to do about the deprecation of
+the ``AUTH_PROFILE_MODULE`` and the ``get_profile`` method. This will be
+removed in Django 1.7. I've been doing some more reading about this and I'm
+less scared about this than I used to. I'll probably just change my profile
+model to have a one-to-one relationship with the provided ``User`` model. I'll
+have to do some more researching and thinking about this before Django 1.7.
+
+
+Conclusion
+==========
+
+Once again the upgrade process went smoother and quicker than I thought thanks
+to the excellent release notes and the Django team's use of Python warnings to
+flag deprecated features.
+
+
+.. _Django: https://www.djangoproject.com/
+.. _release notes: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.6/releases/1.6/
+.. _deprecation timeline: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.6/internals/deprecation/
+.. _warnings: http://docs.python.org/library/warnings.html
+.. _pdb: http://docs.python.org/library/pdb.html
+.. _unittest: http://docs.python.org/2/library/unittest.html
+.. _CONN_MAX_AGE: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.6/ref/settings/#conn-max-age
+.. _XSS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_scripting
+.. _configurable user model: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.5/topics/auth/customizing/#auth-custom-user
+.. _django-debug-toolbar: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/django-debug-toolbar
+.. _Celery: http://www.celeryproject.org/
+.. _Haystack: http://haystacksearch.org/