Django 1.1 is out! This release has some great new features:

• aggregation support for SQL aggregate queries (COUNT, MIN, MAX)
• query expressions can now refer to another field in the query
• admin actions allow custom actions to be taken on a group of model objects in bulk
• a bunch of other stuff… RTFRN

Many of our newer Django projects have been developed against the 1.1 feature set. django-blogdor supports admin actions for publishing posts. This has made the admin interface much easier to use for our bloggers. James is in the process of redeveloping this site, Sunlight Labs, against 1.1. Some of our other Django-powered sites include Sunlight Foundation, Earmark Watch, Capitol Words, and Read the Bill.

We have been big proponents of Django here at Sunlight Labs. When organizations tell us that they are planning to use a CMS like Drupal, we urge them to consider using Django + Pinax instead. Pinax has many of the same features, but provides much more flexibility in the long run. We have also released many of our internal Django apps:

• django-blogdor blogging application
• django-gatekeeper generic model object moderation
• django-honeypot generic honeypot utilities to fight bot form submissions
• django-mediasync sync media with S3 and manage dev/prod media URLs
• django-secretballot a generic django voting application that allows voting without a logged in user
• django-shortcuts admin-configurable redirects

This is just a selection of some of the best projects. Check out the rest on our GitHub account.

And despite media reports to the contrary, our Ruby developers are still free to program in any language/framework they choose.