Aug. 7, 2026

Issue 349: Django 6.1 and a DSF Executive Director

in blog	Django News
published date	2026-08-07
original entry	Issue 349: Django 6.1 and a DSF Executive Director

News

The DSF is hiring its first Executive Director to run fundraising, operations, staff, and legal/compliance for the Foundation. The role is US-based (no visa sponsorship). Applications (resume, optional cover letter, and a vision statement) are due September 14, 2026.

Django 6.1 introduces model field fetch modes, database-level delete options for ForeignKey.on_delete, and dictionary-based email settings. Django 6.0 is now out of mainstream support and receives security and data loss fixes only until April 2027, so plan your upgrade before then.

Thank you to release manager Jacob Walls and the entire Django team on another happy feature release.

Releases

The releases address high-severity spatial lookup flaws that could write files or make network requests, plus denial-of-service risks in language and geometry handling and potential XSS from unsafe admin URLField values. Upgrade to Django 6.0.8 or 5.2.17 as soon as possible.

Python 3.15.0 candidate 1 is available for testing, giving projects a release candidate against which to check compatibility and build wheels.

Python 3.14.7 and 3.13.15 are available as bug-fix releases, so update your installations.

Wagtail CMS News

A standards-based look at what agent readiness requires, without the usual hype.

Django Fellow Reports

Highlights this week included clearing release blockers for 6.1 and making the parallel test runner more fault tolerant. That means lots of tickets triaged, reviewed, and authored!

This week I prioritized time-sensitive security work 🥷, including finalizing patches, preparing and validating backports, and sending pre-notifications ahead of the release. Alongside that, I focused on Tim’s “Sprint quickstart” PR 🏃‍➡️ and attended meetings 🎧. Otherwise, I spent time preparing my DjangoCon US talk (it is coming together well, even if I am a bit wary of expectations around my htmx expertise 🎤).

Focus of the week was mostly around helping finalize the security release and reviewing the GSOC Selenium to Playwright migration (which is looking in good shape!).

Articles

Mariatta built a set of Django house rules for Claude to follow in her own projects, covering formatting (black, isort, djlint, flake8), full test coverage as a merge requirement, has_perm() over group-membership checks for permissions, and a single Markdown email template that renders both text and HTML. She's explicit that these are personal conventions, not Django community consensus, and that a project's own style wins when contributing elsewhere. She published it as an Astro static site rather than plain Markdown, since she'd rather read the rules in a browser than as agent-only files.

The best parts of Django are the ones you stop noticing — a tour of the abstractions that have given Buttondown the most leverage over the years.

A walkthrough of wiring django-vite into a Django project: hot module replacement so CSS edits show up without a full page reload, explicit imports instead of global script-tag collisions, and a vite_asset template tag that resolves to the dev server or hashed production files depending on DEBUG.

An experienced developer's take on years of building applications with Django and why the latest update continues a philosophy that many modern frameworks seem to have forgotten.

The comparison explains why time-machine avoids freezegun's O(n) slowdown when mocking dates and times, building on benchmarks that found it 100 to 200 times faster across two project sizes.

Python 3.15.0 release candidate 1 is out, followed by maintenance releases Python 3.14.7 and 3.13.15. The latest Core Dispatch also tracks two new PEPs entering the queue.

Agents can now rebase your local tweaks against upstream automatically, so personalizing a tool costs a prompt instead of an ongoing maintenance burden. That's the case for why closed-source tools like Claude Code can't be personalized the way open alternatives like Codex or Pi can.

DjangoCon US

Save 10% on DjangoCon US 2026 registration

DjangoCon US 2026 runs August 24 to 28 in Chicago, now under three weeks away. Register through our link to take 10% off. Time is running out to get your ticket. Get yours before they are gone!

Events

Conference chair Keanya Phelps rounds up Italian beef at Mr. Beef and Al's, ramen and vinyl records at Wax in West Town, shuffleboard at Electric Shuffle, and rooftop lake views at Offshore on Navy Pier. She also flags the free Chicago House Music Festival in Millennium Park, August 27 to 30, which overlaps the last days of the conference.