Removing the magic

Due to its humble origins as an internal tool, Django had a lot of Lawrence Journal-World-specific oddities. To make Django truly general purpose, an effort dubbed Removing the Lawrence had already been underway.

However, the most significant refactoring effort that Django developers had to undertake was called Removing the Magic. This ambitious project involved cleaning up all the warts Django had accumulated over the years, including a lot of magic (an informal term for implicit features) and replacing them with a more natural and explicit Pythonic code. For example, the model classes used to be imported from a magic module called django.models.*, rather than being directly imported from the models.py module they were defined in.

At that time, Django had about a hundred thousand lines of code, and it was a significant rewrite of the API. On May 1, 2006, these changes, almost the size of a small book, were integrated into Django's development version trunk and released as Django release 0.95. This was a significant step toward the Django 1.0 milestone.