What's the best way to upgrade from Django 0.96 to 1.0?
Just upgrade your app. The switch from 0.96 to 1.0 was huge, but in terms of Backwards Incompatible changes I doubt your app even has 10% of them.
I was on trunk before Django 1.0 so I the transition for me was over time but even then the only major things I had to change were newforms, newforms-admin, str() to unicode() and maxlength to max_length
Most of the other changes were new features or backend rewrites or stuff that as someone who was building basic websites did not even get near.
Should I try to actually upgrade my existing app, or just rewrite it mostly from scratch, saving what pieces (templates, etc) I can?