edit: OK, I remember now what was the problem with 1.2 - need to change requirement to use Coffin library version 0.3.3, the default requirement is 0.3.
Give it a shot, a while ago someone tested askbot with 1.2 and it worked. I have not tested yet myself.
For safety - not to affect your site-wide python libraries - you might create a virtual environment
virtualenv /path/to/new/env --no-site-packages
Then run
/path/to/new/env/bin/pip install askbot
Then using a similar command install the version of django that you would like to use:
/path/to/new/env/bin/pip install django==1.2.3
If you find any barring issues, please tell about them, but hopefully it will just work.
Askbot ships with setup.py file where versions of some dependencies are very specific. You can override them by editing the setup.py, then run /path/to/your/virtual/env/python setup.py install.
There is also option python setup.py develop - useful when you clone code from the repo and plan to use git to maintain your customizations (like skin).
After installing it is possible to run tests python manage.py test askbot - works much faster with postgres. Two or three tests will fail because there is some missing test data, but the remaining tests should pass.
