Django forms, inheritance and order of form fields

From Django 1.9+

Django 1.9 adds a new Form attribute, field_order, allowing to order the field regardless their order of declaration in the class.

class MyForm(forms.Form):
    summary = forms.CharField()
    description = forms.CharField(widget=forms.TextArea)
    author = forms.CharField()
    notes = form.CharField()

    field_order = ['author', 'summary']

Missing fields in field_order keep their order in the class and are appended after the ones specified in the list. The example above will produce the fields in this order: ['author', 'summary', 'description', 'notes']

See the documentation: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/stable/ref/forms/api/#notes-on-field-ordering

Up to Django 1.6

I had this same problem and I found another technique for reordering fields in the Django CookBook:

class EditForm(forms.Form):
    summary = forms.CharField()
    description = forms.CharField(widget=forms.TextArea)


class CreateForm(EditForm):
    name = forms.CharField()

    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        super(CreateForm, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
        self.fields.keyOrder = ['name', 'summary', 'description']

From Django 1.9: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.10/ref/forms/api/#notes-on-field-ordering

Original answer: Django 1.9 will support this by default on the form with field_order:

class MyForm(forms.Form):
    ...
    field_order = ['field_1', 'field_2']
    ...

https://github.com/django/django/commit/28986da4ca167ae257abcaf7caea230eca2bcd80