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 lazy imports, frozendict, sentinel objects, a faster JIT, and UTF-8 as the default encoding.
Updates to Django
Today, "Updates to Django" is presented by Raffaella from Djangonaut Space! 🚀
Last week we had 24 pull requests merged into Django by 16 different contributors - including 2 first-time contributors! Congratulations to Margaret Fero and diaxoaine for having their first commits merged into Django - welcome on board!
EmailMessage.message()now raises aValueErrorifBccis included in theheadersargument orextra_headersattribute. Use thebccargument instead. #37152- Calling
QuerySet.aiterator()afterprefetch_related()without providing achunk_sizeis deprecated. It currently falls back to achunk_sizeof 2000, but aValueErrorwill be raised in Django 7.1. #37143
Articles
Teach your linter your own rules
boa-restrictor is a Python/Django linter that now lets you register your own AST-based rule classes via pyproject.toml to enforce project-specific conventions. This is especially useful as a deterministic guardrail for keeping AI coding agents from repeating unwanted patterns.
Why I wrote PEP 832 -- virtual environment discovery
PEP 832 proposes a standard way for editors and AI tools to discover Python virtual environments, aiming to make project setup smoother regardless of your workflow tool.
Supporting Django's Next Chapter
Caktus Group has become a founding sponsor of the Django Software Foundation's new Executive Director position, investing in Django's long term sustainability and encouraging other companies to do the same.
Mitigated API authentication bypass for python.org download metadata
Python.org has disclosed and mitigated an authentication bypass that could have altered download metadata, with no evidence of exploitation after extensive audits and additional security hardening.
How I Architected Automatic Parking Detection in Django — Bluetooth Disconnects, Geofence Events, and a Strict State Machine
A deep dive into building a reliable Django parking detection system using Bluetooth events, geofencing, state machines, and optimistic locking to safely handle concurrency.
What I learned from two days of hanging out with AI experts
Five practical takeaways from an AI conference suggest the future belongs to model agnosticism, measurable ROI, and smaller open models instead of hype.
Videos
Learning Python in the Age of AI
In this short interview from PyCon US, Sheena O’Connell discusses one of the biggest questions facing developers today: how should people learn Python in the age of AI?
Paolo Melchiorre on AI-Assisted Development
Another PyCon US 2026 chat, this time with Paolo Melchiorre talking about Django, AI-assisted development, open-source maintainership, and how the Python community is adapting to AI.
Django Forum
Django 6.1 release - timeline and next steps
Notes and updates from Fellow Jacob Walls on the 6.1 release process.
Adding database backend methods to get hardcoded or nonexistent primary key values for tests
From Tim Graham, surfacing ticket #37175 “to see what our creative community can suggest.”
Django Fellow Reports
Jacob Walls
Tended to a flurry of fixes before the non-release-blocker bugfix freeze for Django 6.1 in a few days. Also chipped away at some performance improvements for ASGI projects using sync middleware.
Natalia Bidart
Lots of preparation for the upcoming 6.1 βeta, with the goal of stabilizing recent changes and ensuring overall readiness 🚀. I also spent time digging into Django’s async behavior, reviewing recent changes and following through on related optimizations and documentation updates 📒. I also looked more closely at packaging and reproducibility, especially around artifact builds, to improve our consistency in the release process 📦.
Django Job Board
Senior Python/Django Developer at Gryps
Founding ML/Data Scientist (Remote, UK) at MyDataValue
Projects
vintasoftware/django-ai-boost
A MCP server for Django applications, inspired by Laravel Boost.
Archmonger/ServeStatic
Production-grade Python static file server. Run as middleware or standalone.