This is a release with significant improvements and changes. Please read through this list before you upgrade.
New features:
* Support for \--checkout argument, thanks to [foobacca](https://github.com/foobacca/).
* Support for pre-generate and post-generate hooks, thanks to [raphigaziano](https://github.com/raphigaziano/). Hooks are Python or shell scripts that run before and/or after your project is generated.
* Support for absolute paths to cookiecutters, thanks to [krallin](https://github.com/krallin/).
* Support for Mercurial version control system, thanks to [pokoli](https://github.com/pokoli/).
* When a cookiecutter contains invalid Jinja2 syntax, you get a better message that shows the location of the TemplateSyntaxError. Thanks
to [benjixx](https://github.com/benjixx/).
* Can now prompt the user to enter values during generation from a local cookiecutter, thanks to [ThomasChiroux](https://github.com/ThomasChiroux/). This is now always the default behavior. Prompts can also be suppressed with --no-input.
* Your cloned cookiecutters are stored by default in your ~/.cookiecutters/ directory (or Windows equivalent). The location is configurable. (This is a major change from the pre-0.7.0 behavior, where cloned cookiecutters were deleted at the end of project generation.) Thanks [raphigaziano](https://github.com/raphigaziano/).
* User config in a \~/.cookiecutterrc file, thanks to [raphigaziano](https://github.com/raphigaziano/). Configurable settings are cookiecutters\_dir and default\_context.
* File permissions are now preserved during project generation, thanks to [benjixx](https://github.com/benjixx/).
Bug fixes:
* Unicode issues with prompts and answers are fixed, thanks to [s-m-i-t-a](https://github.com/s-m-i-t-a/).
* The test suite now runs on Windows, which was a major effort. Thanks to [pydanny](https://github.com/pydanny), who collaborated on this with me.
Other changes:
* Quite a bit of refactoring and API changes.
* Lots of documentation improvements. Thanks [sloria](https://github.com/sloria/), [alex](https://github.com/alex/), [pydanny](https://github.com/pydanny), [freakboy3742](https://github.com/freakboy3742), [es128](https://github.com/es128/), [rolo](https://github.com/rolo/).
* Better naming and organization of test suite.
* A CookiecutterCleanSystemTestCase to use for unit tests affected by the user\'s config and cookiecutters directory.
* Improvements to the project\'s Makefile.
* Improvements to tests. Thanks [gperetin](https://github.com/gperetin/), [s-m-i-t-a](https://github.com/s-m-i-t-a/).
* Removal of subprocess32 dependency. Now using non-context manager version of subprocess.Popen for Python 2 compatibility.
* Removal of cookiecutter\'s cleanup module.
* A bit of setup.py cleanup, thanks to [oubiga](https://github.com/oubiga/).
* Now depends on binaryornot 0.2.0.