Additionally, some existing APIs have been deprecated; under `our API

stability policy <misc-api-stability>`, these APIs will continue to

work for now, but will raise ``PendingDeprecationWarning`` in Django

1.2 and ``DeprecationWarning`` in Django 1.3, before being removed in

Django 1.4.

Class-based test runners

------------------------

Django 1.2 changes the test runner tools to use a class-based

approach. Old style function-based test runners will still work, but

should be updated to use the new :ref:`class-based runners

<topics-testing-test_runner>`.

``Feed`` in ``django.contrib.syndication.feeds``

------------------------------------------------

The :class:`django.contrib.syndication.feeds.Feed` class is being

replaced by the :class:`django.contrib.syndication.views.Feed` class.

The old ``feeds.Feed`` class is deprecated, and will be removed in

Django 1.4.

The new class has an almost identical API, but allows instances to be

used as views. For example, consider the use of the old framework in

the following :ref:`URLconf <topics-http-urls>`::

    from django.conf.urls.defaults import *

    from myproject.feeds import LatestEntries, LatestEntriesByCategory

    feeds = {

        'latest': LatestEntries,

        'categories': LatestEntriesByCategory,

    }

    urlpatterns = patterns('',

        # ...

        (r'^feeds/(?P<url>.*)/$', 'django.contrib.syndication.views.feed',

            {'feed_dict': feeds}),

        # ...

    )

Using the new Feed class, these feeds can be deployed directly as views::

    from django.conf.urls.defaults import *

    from myproject.feeds import LatestEntries, LatestEntriesByCategory

    urlpatterns = patterns('',

        # ...

        (r'^feeds/latest/$', LatestEntries()),

        (r'^feeds/categories/(?P<category_id>\d+)/$', LatestEntriesByCategory()),

        # ...

    )

If you currently use the ``feed()`` view, the ``LatestEntries`` class

would not need to be modified apart from subclassing the new

:class:`~django.contrib.syndication.views.Feed` class.

However, ``LatestEntriesByCategory`` uses the ``get_object()`` method

with the ``bits`` argument to specify a specific category to show. In

the new :class:`~django.contrib.syndication.views.Feed` class,

``get_object()`` method takes a ``request`` and arguments from the

URL, so it would look like this::

    from django.contrib.syndication.views import Feed

    from django.shortcuts import get_object_or_404

    from myproject.models import Category

    class LatestEntriesByCategory(Feed):

        def get_object(self, request, category_id):

            return get_object_or_404(Category, id=category_id)

        # ...

Additionally, the ``get_feed()`` method on ``Feed`` classes now take

different arguments, which may impact you if you use the ``Feed``

classes directly. Instead of just taking an optional ``url`` argument,

it now takes two arguments: the object returned by its own

``get_object()`` method, and the current ``request`` object.

To take into account ``Feed`` classes not being initialized for each

request, the ``__init__()`` method now takes no arguments by default.

Previously it would have taken the ``slug`` from the URL and the

``request`` object.

In accordance with `RSS best practices`_, RSS feeds will now include

an ``atom:link`` element. You may need to update your tests to take

this into account.

For more information, see the full :ref:`syndication framework

documentation <ref-contrib-syndication>`.

.. _RSS best practices: http://www.rssboard.org/rss-profile

Cookie encoding

---------------

Due to cookie-handling bugs in Internet Explorer, Safari, and possibly

other browsers, our encoding of cookie values was changed so that the

characters comma (',') and semi-colon (';') are treated as non-safe

characters, and are therefore encoded as ``\054`` and ``\073``

respectively. This could produce backwards incompatibilities if you

are relying on the ability to set these characters directly in cookie

values.