Upgrading Django to 1.8

As they said, having last version has several benefits:

• New features and improvements are added.
• Bugs are fixed.
• Older version of Django will eventually no longer receive security updates.
• Upgrading as each new Django release is available makes future upgrades less painful by keeping your code base up to date.

Also it's even greater that 1.8 is a LTS (Long-term support), that means we will get bug fixes and security updates for a guaranteed period of time, typically 3+ years.

How the upgrade has affected to some Django 1.4 production code?, hard to say in few words, it depends on how the code is (+ 3rd party pieces), but main spots - to take it carefully - I've noted were:

• Changes in how settings are organized, take a look to your settings and try to split it in environment files (tsd example).
• Migration tool is now builtin (not depending on South any more since 1.7), take care while migrating between migrating tool :P.
• I've never used URL's with namespaces before ({% url 'namespace:view' %}). It's a nice feature available in 1.4 too (didn't know) if you pretend to reuse an app in more than a project.
• In urls.py django.conf.urls.default is becoming in django.conf.urls (from 1.6).
• Cache key is now the ABSOLUTE URL (full request required to set/get a key).
• ManyToMany field warning related to the stupid null=True.
• Query filtering by datetime has changed a bit.
• Changes in wsgi and gunicorn files (not using gunicorn_django any more).
• Don't forget to enable ALLOWED_HOSTS in your production settings (from 1.7).

It would be very tough if this above points pretend to be a guide or something like that. Not by a long shot. My recommendation is - of course - take a cup of your favourite drink, a bunch of patience... start reading the release notes and, above all, have as much fun as you can :).