News

Django security releases issued: 6.1.3, 6.0.10, and 5.2.19

Six CVEs, three of them in GeoDjango: two server-side request forgery holes where GDAL resolved URLs or files from GeoJSON CRS members and SpatialReference strings (full protection needs GDAL 3.9+, flagged by the new gis.W001 check), plus log injection through GeometryField. The rest cover base64 uploads that ignored FILE_UPLOAD_MAX_MEMORY_SIZE, cache keys that confused missing and empty Vary headers, and password hashes shown to view-only admin users. Upgrade soon.

Django Software Foundation

Django Steering Council Meeting, November 2

The Steering Council met with the Fellows ahead of the mid-January feature freeze, with Carlton Gibson aiming to land the async transactions PR before then. They also weighed what to do now that sqlparse is no longer maintained (it backs --debug-sql and inspectdb), how to surface DEP discussions on the Forum, and GSoC 2027 ideas.

Python Software Foundation

Announcing new Security Developer at the PSF

Brett Smith, formerly of the W3C and Software Freedom Conservancy, joins Seth Larson and Mike Fiedler on the PSF security team in a new role funded by Anthropic. The Python Security Response Team is handling 3-4× last year's volume of reports and CVEs, and PyPI malware is up 60%, so Brett will help with remediation and scale PyPI's autonomous quarantine program.

How the Python ecosystem responded to the eMudhra intermediate compromise

Within two days of the October 20 CA compromise, fixes shipped for certifi, Python, pip, uv, sigstore, virtualenv, and more, and Python added a last-resort denylist for the bad intermediates (CVE-2026-115557) that was backported to older releases. Seth Larson explains why certifi, pip, and Python sat in the critical path, and why browsers were safe from day one thanks to certificate revocation lists, which Python may adopt.

Wagtail CMS News

Wagtail 8.1: automate more with an improved API and agent-ready tools

The preview REST API can now write more content types, expose StreamField block schemas, and drive moderation workflows (submit, approve, reject, cancel), alongside official agent skills and a prototype CLI. Editors also get SEO checks for meta titles and descriptions, pages can be served as JSON or Markdown from the same URL, and multilingual sitemaps now include translated pages.

An official headless demo for Wagtail

bakerydemo-headless rebuilds the bakery demo as a fully decoupled Next.js front-end in TypeScript, with live preview still working in the CMS. Thibaud Colas notes it runs about 95% on Wagtail's built-in v3 API, whose OpenAPI schema generates typed clients down to individual StreamField blocks, with no GraphQL required.

Updates to Django

Today, "Updates to Django" is presented by Hwayoung from Djangonaut Space! 🚀

Last week we had 17 pull requests merged into Django by 12 different contributors - including 2 first-time contributors! Congratulations to Alex Henman and Spoko Dev for having their first commits merged into Django - welcome on board!

News in Django:

• Django now supports the HTTP QUERY method, allowing safe, idempotent requests with query content in the request body (#37232).
• Django templates now support template tags spanning multiple lines, making tags with several arguments easier to read (#35899).
• Fixed a regression where BoundField.legend_tag() could add a custom required CSS class more than once when passed attrs (#37463).

Django Fellow Reports

Django Fellow Report - Jacob

Jacob Tyler Walls finalized the patches and sent prenotifications for Django's November security releases, then started drafting patches for the next round. He also fixed attrs mutation in legend_tag(), opened a follow-up optimizing lookup preparation for GeoJSON geometries, and sat in on Executive Director interviews.

Django Fellow Report - Sarah

Sarah Boyce accepted five tickets, including consistent database selection for subqueries, dropping GIS support on 32-bit Windows, and a parallel test runner crash, and reviewed fixes for XOR join promotion, select_for_update() after combined queries, and warning assertions. Her own PR allowing multiline template tags was merged, and she worked on three security reports and interviewed final candidates for Executive Director.

Django Fellow Report - Natalia

Natalia Bidart prepared the branch that bootstraps Django 2028, the first calendar-versioned release: it drops Python 3.12 and 3.13, removes the EMAIL_* settings in favor of MAILERS, and finalizes several ORM deprecations, and it lands in mid-January once the 6.2 branch is cut. She also pushed docs PRs that give local builds a new theme and better accessibility, and joined three Executive Director interviews.

Sponsored

Django for Beginners, 6th Edition

The sixth edition is out now, available in digital and paperback formats. It features two new chapters, completely updated for Django 6.1+, and more. Read the first four chapters for free to try it out.

Articles

Soft delete in Django without making a mess

Stein Ove Helset builds soft delete on a deleted_at timestamp and works through where it breaks: bulk QuerySet.delete() still removes rows, unique=True blocks re-creating a deleted record (a conditional UniqueConstraint fixes that, though MySQL and MariaDB ignore the condition), restores can collide with newer rows, and CASCADE never fires for related objects. A filtered default manager paired with an unfiltered base manager keeps related lookups working.

N+1 queries in Django Admin

If a related model's __str__ reads another foreign key, every option in an admin dropdown runs its own query, and select_related() on the edited object doesn't reach those options. Override formfield_for_foreignkey() and formfield_for_manytomany() to add select_related() to the querysets behind the widgets.

Django's Generic Views: TemplateView

Ben Cardy's series on class-based views reaches TemplateView, which needs only a template_name. He uses extra_context for static values, get_context_data() for computed ones, and template_engine to render a single view with Jinja2.

Taking Website Screenshots with Django, Celery, and Playwright

Nik Tomazic builds a Dockerized Django app that takes full-page or viewport screenshots with Playwright. Each capture runs in a Celery task so the form returns right away, and the page polls a small JSON status view until the image is ready. An optional last section moves the browser to Browser Use's paid hosted Chromium for when local browsers eat worker memory or hit bot detection.

Looking for a job? Start a blog.

Tim Schilling argues that a blog shows a hiring manager how you communicate before they ever talk to you, and suggests starter topics like a recent technical decision or how you review code. He says the host doesn't matter (GitHub Pages, dev.to, and Medium all work) and asks you to write it yourself instead of with AI, since the point is to show how you think.

How Caktus Runs and Uses Local Models

Tobias McNulty and Colin Copeland describe the two-GPU workstation Caktus uses to serve open-weight models over Tailscale, so client code stays on its own network. A dense Qwen3.8-27B handles planning and long sessions, and a Qwen3.6 MoE with 3B active parameters runs everyday work at 200-250 tokens per second, both on vLLM in Docker Compose. The post includes their benchmarks, why Gemma 4 31B didn't make the cut, and the pi.dev and VS Code configs they use daily.

Per-Object Permissions in Django That Roll Back with Atomic()

Joshua Fields wrote pemba, a Zanzibar-style authorization library that keeps per-object permission relationships in your own Django database. A grant is just rows in the current transaction, so it commits or rolls back with the data it protects, which a separate service like SpiceDB can't guarantee.

Artisanal Podcasting in the Age of AI

Will Vincent has hand-edited Django Chat in GarageBand for nearly seven years, even with AI tools that promise to handle the whole thing. Editing gives him a second listen to each conversation and a kind of deep focus he no longer gets when coding with a handful of AI agents.

Caching at Scale in Django: Lessons from Production

Johnny Metz's team handled about 20x traffic growth on a multi-tenant Django API by caching aggressively: per-user lists of document IDs paired with one shared entry per document, seven-day TTLs with invalidation on Django signals, a cached identity lookup, and failing open when Redis goes down. During the rollout, database queries per second halved, and Redis now serves most reads at a 97% hit rate.

Events

DjangoCon Europe 2027 Call for Participation

DjangoCon Europe runs February 17-21, 2027, in Innsbruck, Austria, and wants talk and workshop proposals on technical and non-technical topics from new and experienced speakers. Proposals close November 15, 2026.

Podcasts

Django Chat #209: Databases, Django APIs, and AI - Haki Benita

Haki Benita talks about getting more out of Django's ORM and PostgreSQL indexes, why Django Ninja appeals for APIs, and what Django needs for typing and a built-in API story. They also get into how AI is changing the way developers learn and share what they know.

Videos

From librarian to Djangonaut: My Open Source journey with Annabelle Wiegart

In a guest talk for Djangonaut Space Session 7, Annabelle Wiegart traces her path from librarian to Django contributor, PyLadies Zurich organizer, and Djangonaut Space captain. She talks about working on ORM tickets and nullable expressions with mentors, and how contributing went from intimidating to something she could do.

Django Forum

A Path to Modernizing APIs in Django (DEP 0017 Content Type Parsing)

Picking up from the Haki Benita episode of Django Chat, Will Vincent lists what stands between Django and a built-in API: a modernized HttpRequest through DEP 0017, a pluggable serialization layer (the hardest part), and then the view layer. Carlton Gibson wants those primitives updated first, while Haki would settle on an official API interface and tune performance later.

Django Job Board

The PSF's CPython Developer in Residence opening leads the board this week, alongside senior Python roles at webbyfox consultancy and at Manychat in Barcelona, with relocation support.

CPython Developer in Residence at Python Software Foundation

Senior Python Engineer at webbyfox consultancy

Senior Python Engineer (Barcelona-based / Relocation support to Barcelona) at Manychat

Projects

amureki/django-cmdbar

Adds a Cmd+K / Ctrl+K palette to the Django admin for jumping to models, searching records (user alice), or opening one by primary key (user#42). It respects admin permissions and needs no frontend dependencies, middleware, URLs, or migrations: just add django_cmdbar above django.contrib.admin in INSTALLED_APPS.

Metron-Project/izaya

An htmx-powered autocomplete widget for Django forms that ships no required styles, so it fits any CSS framework. Register a ModelLookup with your search_fields, drop LookupWidget into a form (with multiple=True for multi-selects), and use rank_fields to put the closest matches first; it needs Python 3.14+ and Django 6.0+.

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