1.3 release notes should mention snafu regarding model form help_text formatting

[David Chandek-Stark]

The documentation and source code release of the (good) change in which model forms render help_text strings wrapped in <span class="helptext"></span> elements is rather a mess. Ticket #8426 notes that the change was made "hopefully for real this time" in r13522. However, Django 1.2.5 (r15473) does *not* include this patch. Ticket #15204 fixing the documentation was closed (ready for checkin) nearly 2 months ago, but the docs (as of Thu Mar 31 11:00:00 EDT 2011) at ​http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/forms/fields/#help-text still show the wrong information.

I think it would be good to add a section to the 1.3 release notes (or perhaps a separate blog post) clarifying the situation. This was an important (if small) change in that I for one had taken care to work around the lack of a <span> wrapper in model form rendering by including the element directly in model field help_text, and am happy to know that that poor hack is no longer necessary.

Thanks for the consideration.

[Luke Plant]

Django 1.2.5 does not include this because it is a feature and features are not backported.

And the docs you linked to show the correct information (compare with the 1.2 docs).

So, everything seems to be in order, and was in order by the time 1.3 release was made. Please re-open if there is something I have misunderstood or overlooked.

Thanks!

[David Chandek-Stark]

I did not mean to imply that the feature *should* have been in Django 1.2.5; the main points are: the 1.3 release notes do not mention the change; and, the doc currently on the site is, I'm afraid, wrong regarding help_text rendering.

The doc shows the f.as_table() printing help_text this way:

<br />A valid email address, please.

See ​http://code.djangoproject.com/browser/django/trunk/docs/ref/forms/fields.txt#L217.

However, the source code from 1.3 clearly shows the <span> wrapper -- see ​http://code.djangoproject.com/browser/django/tags/releases/1.3/django/forms/forms.py#L216 -- and the documentation was fixed in r15396. I don't know how these changes get applied to the live site, I'm just trying to help out here.

(I originally referred specifically to *model* forms, but both Form and ModelForm classes inherit the behavior from BaseForm.)

[Luke Plant]

Ah, the first line is correct (it has the span wrapper), the third line is incorrect, we were obviously looking at different bits. Accepted on that basis.

I really don't see the need for this to be in the release notes - it is a very small feature, without any complications, and there are (probably) many other small features like that not mentioned in the release notes. The docs should probably include a 'Changed in Django 1.3' admonition to note the addition of the span, but that is all.

[Aymeric Augustin]

Change UI/UX from NULL to False.

[Aymeric Augustin]

Change Easy pickings from NULL to False.

[Tim Graham]

We'll be removing "Changed in Django 1.3" annotations soon, so marking this as won't fix.