Like many of you, I am migrating all my Django sites to Django 1.2.1. For sites that are currently in production, I am doing the slow migration route. Just trying to get the site up with 1.2 without using any of the new features yet. One thing that I ran into is the new CSRF support. If you were not using it before, there really is no change with one exception -- all the generic views and admin views requires CSRF protection. This means that if you are using django login view django.contrib.auth.views.login , you have to make sure that any wrapper or custom templates support CSRF.

Specifically:

If you use your own login template, you must add {% csrf_token %} to the end of the openning form tag.
If you wrap the call to login with your own view, you must add the csrf decorator @csrf_protect to your view, after importing django.views.decorators.csrf.csrf_protect
If you use the django.contrib.auth.logout view to redisplay a login form, you have to replace that with a wrapper because the auth.logout view does NOT add the csrf token. (Updated)

Otherwise django will send you a 403 error when you try to login.