Release Notes, Usage, Code
--------------------------

* Please see `here for release notes, news and discussion`_ (Google Group)
* Installation and usage: `Documentation and Examples`_ (or the short `Overview`_)  
* The code is on GitHub_ and Bitbucket_ and can also be downloaded as TGZ_ or ZIP_ 

.. _here for release notes, news and discussion: http://groups.google.de/group/django-polymorphic/topics
.. _Documentation and Examples: http://bserve.webhop.org/wiki/django_polymorphic/doc
.. _GitHub: http://github.com/bconstantin/django_polymorphic
.. _Bitbucket: http://bitbucket.org/bconstantin/django_polymorphic
.. _TGZ: http://github.com/bconstantin/django_polymorphic/tarball/master
.. _ZIP: http://github.com/bconstantin/django_polymorphic/zipball/master
.. _Overview: http://bserve.webhop.org/wiki/django_polymorphic


What is django_polymorphic good for?
------------------------------------

It implements seamless polymorphic inheritance for Django models.

This means: objects being retrieved from the database are always returned
back with the same type/class and fields they were created and saved with.

An example:
If we defined the model ``Project`` as a base class for our models
``ArtProject`` and ``ResearchProject``, and we have stored one of
each into the database, then we can do::

	>>> Project.objects.all()
	.
	[ <Project:         id 1, topic: "John's Gathering">,
	  <ArtProject:      id 2, topic: "Sculpting with Tim", artist: "T. Turner">,
	  <ResearchProject: id 3, topic: "Swallow Aerodynamics", supervisor: "Dr. Winter"> ]
	
It doesn't matter how these objects are retrieved: be it through the
model's own managers/querysets, ForeignKeys, ManyToManyFields
or OneToOneFields.

As seen in this example, the resulting querysets are polymorphic,
and will typically deliver objects of several different types in
a single query result.

django_polymorphic does this only for models that explicitely enable it
(and for their submodels).

Please see the `Documentation and Examples`_ for more information
(also included as the file ``DOCS.rst`` with the source).


Status
------

It's important to consider that this code is very new and
to some extent still experimental. Please see the docs for
current restrictions, caveats, and performance implications.

It does seem to work very well for a number of people, but
API changes, code reorganisations or further schema changes
are still a possibility. There may also remain larger bugs
and problems in the code that have not yet been found.


License
-------

django_polymorphic uses the same license as Django (BSD-like).


Database Schema Change on January 26
------------------------------------

| The update from January 26 changed the database schema (more info in the commit-log_).
| Sorry for any inconvenience. But this should be the final DB schema now.

.. _commit-log: http://github.com/bconstantin/django_polymorphic/commit/c2b420aea06637966a208329ef7ec853889fa4c7