With the announcement of release of Django 1.5 Rest Framework being a topic for discussion among the developers we thought to put some light over some of the biggest new features that you will get with this new release. For those who want to see the release notes you can do so here, Django 1.5B1 Release Notes

Following are some great features you will enjoy with this release:

Configurable User Model
The biggest change coming to Django 1.5 is the option to specify your own user model instead of having to use the one that’s been shipped with Django for the past 6 years. Before Django 1.5, applications that wanted to use Django’s auth framework (django.contrib.auth) had no other option but to use Django’s definition of a “user”. In Django 1.5 you will have the option to create your own User account and add any of the fields you want to (Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, larger email field, etc…).

Python 3 Support
Django 1.5 also includes experimental Python 3 support. They suggest not using it in production yet due to the complexity involved in migrating applications from Python 2 to Python 3 and the lack of use so far in production environments. But not to worry as Django 1.6 will have full Python 3 support.
Saving a Subset of Model’s Fields
You can now supply an update_fields argument to .save() and the model will only update those fields instead of updating every field. This will help in high-concurrency operations and will improve performance.

For example,
obj.name = ‘Adam’
obj.age = ’25’
(# This will only update the name field.)
obj.save(update_fields=[‘name’])

{% verbatim %} template tag
Some Javascript template syntax conflicts with Django’s own templating syntax. Now you can wrap your code in {% verbatim %} {% endverbatim %} tags to ensure that Django won’t parse out the Javascript code.

404.html and 500.html are no longer required
Previously when setting up a new project you had to make sure you have 404.html and 500.html templates in your template directory or Django would throw an exception. Almost every beginner programmer to Django had this problem of including 400.html and 500.html templates in the template directory to avoid exception from Django. Not Anymore! Django provides defaults for these files if they aren’t there. But We suggest You to still create your own to provide a nicer look and more information but fianlly Django won’t throw exceptions if they aren’t there. That’s a relief!

Multi-Column Indexes
You can now enjoy using multi-column indexes if your database supports it. Use index_together = [‘field_1’, ‘field_2’] to create a multi-column index.

AUTH_PROFILE_MODULE
AUTH_PROFILE_MODULE and .get_profile() are now obsolete with the new customizable User objects. If you still need to associate data with a User object, we would recommend you to have a OneToOne field from the Profile to the User model.

Simple json
Since Django 1.5 doesn’t support Python 2.5 and below, they can now rely on the json module that’s included with Python 2.6+. This may have certain unknown side-effects but for the most part that shouldn’t make any difference.
Drawing towards the conclusion Django 1.5’s ability to have configurable User models is a big win for the framework. You can download Django 1.5B1 here,

Download : Django 1.5B1