As part of the Django 1.9 release process, today we've released Django 1.9 alpha 1, a preview/testing package that represents the first stage in the 1.9 release cycle and an opportunity for you to try out the changes coming in Django 1.9.
Django 1.9 has a myriad of goodies which you can read about in the in-development 1.9 release notes.
This alpha milestone marks a complete feature freeze. The current release schedule calls for a beta release in about a month and a release candidate about a month from then. We'll only be able to keep this schedule if we get early and often testing from the community. Updates on the release schedule schedule are available on the django-developers mailing list
As with all alpha and beta packages, this is not for production use. But if you'd like to take some of the new features for a spin, or to help find and fix bugs (which should be reported to the issue tracker), you can grab a copy of the alpha package from our downloads page or on PyPI. As always, signed MD5, SHA1, and SHA256 checksums of the 1.9 alpha package are available.
The PGP key ID used for this release is Tim Graham: 1E8ABDC773EDE252.