Nifty Django Feature: Third-Party Packages

A nifty feature in Django are notes about the community maintained solutions that are available. With Django being 20 years old, one of its greatest strengths is the robustness and variety of third-party packages.

You can find package recommendations on the Community Ecosystem page. Or, if you want to see way more options, you can use the djangopackages.org website. From there you can view entire grids and rubrics breaking down various options for various features and systems.

Another fantastic resource is awesomedjango.org. This is a curated list of several resources and projects by long time Django community members, Will Vincent and Jeff Triplett.

The majority of new features in Django being merged in now have originated as third-party packages. This is where the experimental and exploratory work occurs. It’s also where the more specific implementations occur. We don’t want Django to contain code for every possible situation. Django should provide a solid foundation and hooks for people to choose what features and functionality they want to include.

So before building any major feature by hand, you should search for a third-party project to use or learn from. Chances are, someone in the past 20 years has tried to add it. There’s so much you can do out of the box in Django, but the third-party ecosystem is where the real magic happens.

If you have thoughts, comments, or questions, please let me know. You can set up a meeting with me, or find me on the Fediverse, Django Discord server or use email.