Django community: RSS
This page, updated regularly, aggregates Community blog posts from the Django community.
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Best Django Redis configuration for speed and size
`lzma` compresses the most and `zlib` is about as fast as `zstd` in `django_redis` as compressor. -
How I got Claude certified (and how you can too)
I’m Claude Certified Architect - Foundations now. Look at me. A friend from work, Daniel, pinged me right after he started studying because he was confused and a little frustrated. He’d gone through the official docs, done a couple of practice exams, and felt like there was no connection between what he was studying and what the exam was actually testing. Fair. I felt the same way when I started. So we hopped on a call, I dumped everything I knew, and this post is basically that call cleaned up so more people can use it. Fair warning up front: this is part study guide, part honest review. I’ll tell you how to pass, but I’m also going to be honest about the parts that felt like studying for the exam rather than becoming a better engineer. Both things are true at once. What I studied with The exam I took is the Claude Certified Architect - Foundations. The single most useful resource for me was the Claude Certification Guide. The lessons are very good, and everything that showed up on my exam was covered by the syllabus there. I took notes like a maniac: more than half of a … -
Migrating from FeinCMS to feincms3
Migrating from FeinCMS to feincms3 FeinCMS is still actively maintained, but development, bugfixes and new features mostly land on feincms3 and django-content-editor these days, not on FeinCMS itself. That’s reason enough to eventually move a project over. Someone asked on the feincms3 issue tracker whether there’s a guide for making that move. There isn’t one yet, so I thought I’d expand on my comment in the issue tracker and post it here too in the hope that it’s useful to others. The post is based on a gradual migration we did in a large, long-lived Django project – a textbook publishing platform with years of content. Unfortunately I can’t show more details since it’s a commercial, closed source project. During the migration, the platform stayed in production the whole time, aside from the inevitable bug here and there. The most important insight is that FeinCMS 1 content types and feincms3 plugins are close enough that we could keep using the same underlying database tables. An export/import step isn’t required at all. The overall shape of the migration FeinCMS keeps managing the plugin tables as usual, for now. New feincms3 plugin models get added alongside the old ones, with managed = … -
Issue 346: Supporting the Triptych Project
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Django: introducing django-orjson
Just as cars painted red are known to be faster, libraries implemented in Rust are also known to be faster. Today’s example is orjson, a Rusty replacement for Python’s built-in json module, boasting 10x faster serialization and 2x faster deserialization. Such a library is great, but adopting it isn’t easy, especially when your framework uses json in many different parts. To help Django developers adopt orjson, I have created django-orjson, which provides a whole bunch of drop-in replacements for Django and Django REST Framework (DRF) components backed by orjson. For example, there’s a version of JsonResponse: from django_orjson.http import JsonResponse def index(request): return JsonResponse({"title": "Hello, world!"}) …a test client with matching test case classes: from django_orjson.test import SimpleTestCase class IndexTests(SimpleTestCase): def test_index(self): response = self.client.get("/", headers={"accept": "application/json"}) assert response.status_code == 200 # response.json() uses orjson to parse the response body assert response.json() == {"title": "Hello, world!"} …a version of Django’s json_script template tag: {% load django_orjson %} {{ chart_data|json_script:"chart-data" }} …and plenty more! All tested against the currently supported versions of Python and Django with 100% branch coverage. While database queries tend to dominate the typical Django application’s runtime, the time spent in serialization and deserialization can still be significant. … -
How to use a list/tuple/array in Django with a raw SQL cursor
This does not work: from django.db import connection list_of_values = [1, 2, 3] with connection.cursor() as cursor: cursor.execute(""" SELECT * FROM my_model_table WHERE some_value IN %s """, [ tuple(list_of_values), ]) results = cursor.fetchall() It will give you: django.db.utils.ProgrammingError: syntax error at or near "'(1,2,3)'" LINE 4: WHERE id IN '(1,2,3)' It used to work with psycopg v2. Now, in psycopg v3, you have to use the ANY operator. See "You cannot use IN %s with a tuple" This will work: from django.db import connection list_of_values = [1, 2, 3] with connection.cursor() as cursor: cursor.execute( """ SELECT * FROM my_model_table WHERE some_value = ANY(%s) """, [ list_of_values, ], ) results = cursor.fetchall() Note the ANY(%s), and instead of a list that has a tuple, it's a list that has a list. What About a List of Strings Consider... from django.db import connection -list_of_values = [1, 2, 3] +list_of_values = ['foo', 'bar', 'fiz'] with connection.cursor() as cursor: cursor.execute( """ SELECT * FROM my_model_table WHERE some_value = ANY(%s) """, [ list_of_values, ], ) results = cursor.fetchall() That will result in: django.db.utils.DataError: invalid input syntax for type integer: "foo" LINE 4: WHERE some_value = ANY('{foo,bar,fiz}') My solution was to rewrite the SQL string itself … -
Issue 345: Django security releases issued: 6.0.7 and 5.2.16
News Django security releases issued: 6.0.7 and 5.2.16 Three new CEVs have been addressed in the latest security releases. We encourage all users of Django to upgrade as soon as possible. Django on the Med: Venue and Hotel Details for Edition 2! A few more confirmed details for Django on the Med 🏖️ 2026, which will take place from September 23 to 25, 2026 in Pescara, Italy 🇮🇹. Thank you Lacey - Django Commons Django Commons credits Lacey Henschel for helping shape the admin team from day one, including onboarding Django REST Framework, building the recruitment pipeline, and creating project check-ins that prevent stagnation. Her decision to step down is framed as proof that sustainability includes taking breaks without guilt, with hard judgment calls rooted in respecting maintainers and community trust. Django Software Foundation Last Call 2026 Django Developer Survey The 2026 survey is ending next week on July 13th. Thank you to everyone who already filled it out. Please encourage all your friends and colleagues to do the same. This is the single most important tool for collecting data from the Django community and directly influences the work of Fellows and new features. Updates to Django Today, "Updates to … -
Foss4g NL: early afternoon sessions
(One of my summaries of the 2026 one-day Foss4g open source geo conference in Groningen, NL). Accessibility: geoinformation for everybody - Liliana Santoso-Avis & Jedidja van der Sluis - Stoutjesdijk WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) deals with accessibility (a11y). (I personally try to take accessibility a bit into account, proper headings and reasonably contrast-rich colors on my website, for instance. I've made other summaries of "a11y" talks, for instance this one about accessible documentation, held at the 2025 pycon.de. It is not just accessibility, but really about the quality of the information as a whole. Thinking about the accessibility guidelines (listed below) helps you create better information projects. Perceivable Operable, for instance navigating a website with keyboard instead of mouse. Understandable Robust When making a map viewer, we often claim "we're an exception", but that's not fully the case. Your map component should not be a "keyboard trap", for instance. And the contrast of your map should be right. And if the map is essential for navigating through the rest of the site, you also can't claim an exception. You need a mindset shift. From "bah, extra work" to "hurray, better work". They started with an inventory, for instance of … -
A small proposal to form rendering in Django
It's been a while since my last post, mainly because June saw me start a new client, GSOC really taking off and we have our first real customers in Hamilton Rock with money being deposited and some money being spent, not without its teething issues! Also with a fair amount of social engagements as well! But anyway, on to today's post. During June I proposed a new feature idea which is an extension to Django's form rendering capabilities to include widgets templates inside a form renderer. Currently, it's only possible to Override widgets at a project level by specifying the template name, or you have to overwrite the widget and then specify your own custom template name and then use that custom widget. It's not possible to customize widgets at the form renderer level. My idea is to extend the form renderer API. Well actually extends the budget rendering API to check the specified form renderer. It should only be an extension to a private method inside the widget API. Below is the relevant code that I actually got Claude to spit out inside Hamilton Rock today. This is a first iteration which very likely needs some improvement, but it … -
Issue 344: Happy Birthday Djangonaut Space!
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Python Leiden (NL) meetup summaries
Two summaries of the July 2 2026 Python meetup in Leiden. I've omitted one, "Python with Karel" by EiEi Tun, as I've made a summary of that talk in Utrecht a month ago, already :-) Building modern internal team CLIs with incremental automation - Farid Nouri Neshat Obligatory xkcd cartoons: https://xkcd.com/974 and https://xkcd.com/1319 and https://xkcd.com/1205 Toil: manual, repetitive, automatable, distracting you from your real work, no enduring value. Yes, he likes to automate things :-) Some examples of repetitive manual tasks: Creating dev containers. Gathering data for troubleshooting. Something that needs to be set manually in a database. Setting up a new AWS account. Creating a new dev environment on the new colleague's laptop. How to automate? Do it iteratively! Your boss might not like you to spend a day automating the task. But if you do it small steps at a time... Do it manually the very first time. Then start with documenting the steps. Then turn it into a do-nothing scaffold script: def step1(): print("Open the AWS page manually") input("Press enter to continue") Everytime you do the task, automate a small bit and flesh out the script over time. After many iterations, you'll have automated it fully! "I … -
Weeknotes (2026 week 27)
Weeknotes (2026 week 27) The last entry in this series was published 10 weeks ago so it really is time for another review of the releases I did during this time. Releases feincms3-forms The feincms3-forms forms builder has gained a documentation page on the wonderful Read the Docs service. The 0.6.1 release doesn’t contain any code changes, just pyproject.toml updates and the mentioned documentation rework. django-imagefield django-imagefield 0.23 is still in alpha. The handling of image fields when using libvips is optimized to use less memory hopefully. We’ll see. I also added some tests to verify that .mpo files are handled properly. feincms3 The Vimeo embed now always sets the dnt=1 parameter on the <iframe>, which asks Vimeo to not track the user. django-mptt I wrote about the somewhat annoying maintenance again. The library is still officially unmaintained, but I did a lot of work either just closing issues or also fixing them. The docs also contain many clarifications. I only released 0.19rc1 for now. feincms3-sites and feincms3-language-sites Last time I mentioned that default HTTP/S ports are now stripped so that the host matching can determine the correct site. Now a new case appeared where trailing dots weren’t stripped. The … -
200ms ± 500ms
I once needed the SLA for an endpoint my dashboard leaned on, so I asked the team that owned it. Their lead came back with 200ms ± 500ms. Read that literally and the fastest responses arrive 300ms before the request is even sent. The number wasn’t malicious — it came straight out of the standard formulas. The formulas were wrong for the data, and that mistake is everywhere. -
Maintaining a mature Open Source project: dealing with the upgrade treadmill with the help of a LLM
Maintaining a mature, reasonably-popular Django open-source is boring. Here I explore using a LLM to automate away some of the boring work. -
Open Source Comes From People
I recently attended my first PG Data 2026 conference where keynote speaker Robert Haas delivered a talk that has stayed with me. His keynote focused on the people behind PostgreSQL, the growing challenges of sustaining open-source communities, and the urgent need to cultivate new contributors through mentorship and community engagement. While his remarks centered on PostgreSQL, they sparked broader reflections for me about the future of open source and communities like Django. -
Issue 343: Django 6.1 beta 1 released
News Django 6.1 beta 1 released Django 6.1 beta 1 is now available, giving the community a chance to test upcoming features and improvements before the final release on August 5. Djangonaut Space: Launching Contributors Djangonaut Space shares the results from its first six mentorship sessions, showing how an 8-week cohort program helped launch 104 contributors from 40+ countries into long-term open source participation and leadership. Django Software Foundation How the Django Software Foundation Became a CNA Learn how the Django Software Foundation became a CVE Numbering Authority, giving it the ability to assign CVE IDs directly and streamline Django's security advisory process. Wagtail CMS News Wagtail as Django admin on steroids Think Wagtail is just a CMS? See why it can serve as a polished, modern replacement for Django's admin with a familiar API and powerful features that make client-facing backends shine. Comparing open weight AI models and providers Open weight AI models are closing the gap with proprietary LLMs, and this guide explains how to compare models and providers on performance, cost, energy use, and transparency. Releases Python 3.15.0 beta 3 is here! Python 3.15 beta 3 is out with nearly 200 bug fixes plus major additions like … -
🔗 Recommendations When Using LLM-backed Generative AI Systems for FOSS Contributions
Several recommendations for LLM usage in the context of open source. “The long term goal of software freedom is to eliminate the harm of proprietary technology. While we work toward that greater goal, we should seek to mitigate the harms that we cannot immediately eliminate. These recommendations aim to abate the damage of these systems, and also consider how these tools might counter-intuitively help us advance FOSS.” -
Supporting Django's Next Chapter
The path to hiring an Executive Director gained real momentum at DjangoCon US 2024, when Jacob Kaplan-Moss shared a vision for what dedicated resources could mean for the future of Django. In his blog post If We Had $1,000,000, he invited companies and supporters to help get the initiative off the ground. The response from the community was inspiring, and we’re proud to see that vision become reality. -
Wagtail as Django admin on steroids
Many of you have probably heard of Wagtail CMS, but not everyone knows that Wagtail, in a nutshell, is a supercharged admin backend for Django. At least that's how I see it, and how I often pitch it to fellow Django developers. Django comes with its own django.contrib.admin … Read now -
Boolean algebra
The third article in the series, still on conditions. The previous installment was about their shape — merging ifs, factoring shared decisions, dropping checks that earn nothing. This one reaches for the other lever: the algebra of the conditions themselves — not a textbook tour, just the handful of transformations I lean on in everyday code. -
Issue 342: DSF Executive Director Search
## News Announcing the Search for a DSF Executive Director The Django Software Foundation is hiring its first Executive Director, and we have the Django community to thank for making it possible. Six Django web development agencies have jointly pledged $47,500 to help fund the Executive Director's first year: Caktus Group, Lincoln Loop, Six Feet Up, Cuttlesoft, OddBird, and Two Rock. This is the financial foundation we needed to move from "we should hire an ED someday" to "we are hiring an ED now." I'm delighted to rejoin the Sovereign Tech Fellowship Hugo van Kemenade returns to the Sovereign Tech Fellowship after being one of six participants in the 2025 pilot, calling out how dedicated time helped ship Python 3.14 and 3.15 releases, mentor triagers, and improve release automation and accessibility. The post also tracks a wide set of community and governance work, and looks ahead to a larger 2026 cohort spanning maintainers, community managers, and technical writers. Python Software Foundation Python Software Foundation News: PSF Board Election Dates for 2026 PSF Board elections for 2026 open for nominations on July 28 (2:00 pm UTC) and voting runs September 1 to September 15, with voter affirmation due August 25. The … -
The 2026 way of using importmaps in Django
The 2026 way of using importmaps in Django I last wrote about Django, JavaScript modules and importmaps in May 2025, slightly over a year ago. The main topic of this post is the django-js-asset 4.0 release. The library is used in many places, some of the more well-known packages using it are django-mptt and django-ckeditor. I have since done a lot of work evolving the ways of integrating importmaps but the efforts to standardize upon an approach have stalled a bit. The main reason for this, apart from time and energy, was that I wasn’t really all that happy with the global importmap. When I had only a few modules using the importmap facility, I didn’t care all that much. Now that the recently released django-content-editor 9.0 also uses importmaps for shipping a refactored, much more modular JavaScript implementation while still keeping all the benefits of cache busting using ManifestStaticFilesStorage1, having a global importmap got annoying. The content editor JavaScript is only used within the Django administration interface, but when using a single global importmap object, the importmap entries were always there on each page that used an importmap at all. A better solution was needed. I’m a big fan … -
Cheating as a programming discipline
Great programmers cheat. A hard problem gets quietly swapped for an easier one; a transaction-grade database is replaced by a flat file nobody misses; machinery everyone else considers mandatory simply never gets built. They know a lot — and that’s exactly why they get away with it. -
This isn't a post about eating meat
I think vegetarians are mostly right. Most of their arguments about why we shouldn’t eat meet — environmental impact, treatment of animals, treatment of workers in the industry, health effects of too much meat consumption, climate impact, etc. — I tend to nod along. I’m broadly in agreement with most of their main arguments. And yet, I still eat meat. Why? Partially, it’s because while I agree with most arguments against meat eating, I also think that by and large vegetarians overstate their cases. Most of the environmental and social impacts aren’t really effects of eating meat; they’re results of the choices we’ve made as a society about how we produce meat. Namely, our system of industrialized farming. We don’t have to produce meat in a way that’s environmentally damaging; we’ve chosen to. Likewise, poor health outcomes are a result of eating too much meat (and not enough variety otherwise) — not something inherent in meat itself. My guess, though, is that these arguments aren’t actually that important to most vegetarians: I think that most are probably making the decision on a moral ground. They see killing animals as inexcusable, and sort of back into the other arguments because they’re … -
LLM Inspired Development
How Claude inadvertently suggested new features for my personal site.
