Django 5.2 brings a host of enhancements designed to improve developer productivity, bolster performance, and enhance customization. Notably, it introduces several major new features that streamline workflows, modernize the framework’s architecture, and improve its support for asynchronous operations.

Release Highlights:

• Automatic models import in the shell: Models from all installed apps are auto-imported when running the shell, reducing setup time.
• Composite Primary Keys support: The new CompositePrimaryKey field enables models to use multiple fields as primary keys.
• Simplified BoundField customization: Developers can now more easily override form rendering by setting a custom BoundField at project, form, or field level.
• Expanded asynchronous support in authentication: A suite of new async methods and improved async backend implementations enhance performance and ease of use.
• New form widgets and accessibility improvements: Introduction of widgets like ColorInput, SearchInput, TelInput; along with new accessibility attributes for forms.
• Improved QuerySet value ordering: values() and values_list() now generate a SELECT clause in the specified order.
• Enhanced response and request handling: New properties and methods on HttpResponse and HttpRequest add flexibility and clarity when handling HTTP data.

Upgrade Gotchas:

• Dropped support for PostgreSQL 13 and older versions of GDAL and PostGIS may require backend updates.
• Default MySQL connection character set changed to utf8mb4, which may affect legacy databases.
• Some minor backward-incompatible changes in areas such as error reporting and permission handling require attention.

Major Features:

• Automatic models import in the shell
• Composite Primary Keys with models.CompositePrimaryKey
• Simplified customization of BoundField for forms
• Expanded asynchronous methods in django.contrib.auth and auth backends
• New form widgets (ColorInput, SearchInput, TelInput) and enhanced accessibility
• Improved QuerySet and database function capabilities (e.g., JSONArray, set_returning)