open source funding

Updates to Django

Today 'Updates to Django' is presented by Raffaella Suardini from Djangonaut Space!

Last week we had 15 pull requests merged into Django by 14 different contributors - including 4 first time contributors! Congratulations to Shafiya Adzhani, Cosmic Process, Moein Bbp, and Aaron Linville for having their first commits merged into Django - welcome on board!

News in Django 5.1:

inside OPTIONS, the option "init_command" is now supported on SQLite to specify pragma options <sqlite-init-command> upon connection.
django.contrib.gis.gdal.GeometryCollection and its subclasses now support measured geometries via the new attribute .OGRGeometry.is_measured and m properties, along with the .OGRGeometry.set_measured method.

In Django 5.0 a bug was fixed where filtering on foreign keys wasn't working if the field wasn't in .ModelAdmin.list_filter. It's also solved a crash involving decorators (@sensitive_variables and @sensitive_post_parameters) when loading functions from .pyc files.

Wagtail CMS

How to make your images greener with WebP

Meagen makes a case for switching to WebP and shares some resources that will work with any website.

Wagtail Space talks we'd love to see in 2024

Creative proposal ideas for Wagtail Space and beyond.

Articles

Switching between partial and full html when using django and htmx

Discover how a custom context processor can switch between partial and complete HTML templates in Django, optimizing for HTMX requests.

How to avoid a count query in Django if you can

This article shows us how to get database results with a count in one database query instead of two.

Django User Model Talk

Will posted his thoughts, notes, and slides from his recent Django User Model talk at the Django Boston Meetup.

Paying people to work on open source is good actually

Jacob Kaplan-Moss shares some thoughts on this issue, which we (the writers of this newsletter) wholly agree with. Jacob also writes regularly on many tech-related topics that aren't strictly Django-related, so they are not shared in this newsletter but are always worth a read.

How to open-source in a closed-source environment

A case study about successfully working on an open-source package for a closed-source application.

Events

What's New in Wagtail? March Webinar

Here’s what we’ve got lined up: Universal listings, Dark mode and snug mode, Wagtail AI, Newsletter package sneak preview, and much more!

Videos

svcs: Robust & Testable Python Web Applications with ANY Framework! - YouTube

This is a quick intro to the svcs package – a flexible service locator for Python! Watch it if you want to improve the handling of your web application's ser...

DjangoCon Videos

DjangoCon US 2023 - ^What can (the DSF | I) do for (me | the DSF)\?$

DSF President Chaim Kirby provides an overview of the Django Software Foundation, with a special focus on recent changes and new initiatives meant to increase engagement with Django, the DSF, and the greater Django Community. Followed by a Q&A session.

DjangoCon US 2023 - How to Ride Elephants Safely: Working with PostgreSQL when your DBA is not around

A survival guide for developers who may occasionally be called upon to perform the duties of a PostgreSQL DBA.

DjangoCon US 2023 - One database table, one model, many behaviours: Proxy model

Proxy models are part of Django’s inheritance styles, but how to they work, how are they different from other inheritance styles that Django provide, practically where can they be applied in real world scenarios. Using simple code snippets and practical examples lets explore proxy models.

Podcasts

Django Chat #157: GeoDjango - Harout Boujakjian and Andrew Hornstra

Harout and Andrew are the engineers behind pinplanet, a free Django-based mobile app to pin where you’ve been. We discuss moving from a PWA to native iOS, Kotlin for Android, testing and performance challenges along the way, type hints, and more.