Django Tempus Dominus: setting a format makes the form invalid

Question

I have a very simple form to submit a date. By default, the date format is 'yyyy-MM-dd' and the form works. However as soon as I change format to anything (I tried False and 'LL'), I get an error message on submission: 'Enter a valid date'. So it looks like on submission the default format is used rather than the one I've set. How do I get the preferred format working?

Here is the form:

class DateForm(forms.Form):
    date_field = forms.DateField(
        required=True,
        label='The Date',
        widget=DatePicker(
            options={
                'minDate': '1900-01-01',
                'maxDate': '2050-12-31',
                'format': 'LL',
            },
        ),
        initial='2001-01-01',
    )

And here is the view:

def date_input(request):
    if request.method == 'POST':
        form = DateForm(request.POST)
        if form.is_valid():
            the_date = form.cleaned_data['date_field']
            print(the_date)
    else:
        form = DateForm()
    return render(request, 'calculators/date-input.html', {
        'form': form,
    })

Answer 1

The solution appears to be to use input_formats on the field that would contain the format specified on the widget. In my case, I used 'MMM D, YYYY' on the widget and input_formats=['%b %d, %Y'].