Django's all grown up! I'm pretty psyched about this release. Obviously, the long-awaited migrations functionality is the centerpiece, but for a framework without that many rough edges, they do such a great job of finding the ones that remain and terminating them. Looking forward to the end of magical models.py behavior; to stronger support for apps; easier to use custom QuerySets and reverse relation Managers; and Lookups, Transforms, and custom prefetching in the ORM. This is looking like the most exciting release since 1.4 for tightening up the core of the framework.
Potential things for 1.8 that I'm aware of are composite fields and improved aggregates. Hopefully, there'll also be some work on .values(), .annotate(), and .order_by() that will allow a much broader range of options, which is part of a larger internal refactor of the ORM. No guarantees on any of the above though.
Anybody have any insight into what's next?