Issue 352: PyCharm & Django Fall Fundraiser
| in blog | Django News |
|---|---|
| published date | 2026-08-28 |
| original entry | Issue 352: PyCharm & Django Fall Fundraiser |
News
Buy or renew an annual PyCharm Professional license through the campaign link and you get 30% off while JetBrains donates a matching amount to the DSF, which is working to close the gap between the roughly $300,000 it raises each year and the $500,000 that would make a full-time Executive Director sustainable. The campaign runs through September 10, 2026, so buy or renew before then. A renewal adds 12 months to your existing subscription.
Django Software Foundation
Django moves to one feature release each January under YYYY.N calendar versioning, starting with 2028.0 in place of what would have been 7.0. Every release now gets a year of mainstream support and two years of security fixes, which retires the LTS label.
The machinery behind Django's move to Contributor Covenant 3.0: a 30-day public comment period enforced by a GitHub workflow, CODEOWNERS gating changes to the CoC text, and an automated decision changelog. The working group is releasing its case-tracking templates under CC BY 3.0 for other projects to adopt.
Python Software Foundation
CPython now supports RISC-V at tier 3, the entry level for new platforms, which means the open instruction set architecture gets ongoing testing on real hardware through buildbots donated by the RISE Project. Stan Ulbrych led the work with Ludovic Henry, Furkan Onder, and Emma Smith, backed by a Sovereign Tech Agency fellowship.
Wagtail CMS News
A read-and-write v3 REST API, custom base page models, a global permission policy registry, and formalized Django 6.1 support. Two smaller wins: StreamField block IDs are now available as template context variables, and AVIF and WebP images are no longer converted to PNG by default.
7.0.9, 7.3.4, and 7.4.3 carry the same five fixes as 8.0: permission handling in the Pages, Documents, Images, and translation APIs, document identification by SHA1, and snippet copying. Upgrade to the patch release matching your version.
Google Summer of Code contributor Raghad Dahi rebuilt the user guide site, retiring a versioning scheme that made editors duplicate the whole site per release in favor of blocks readers can filter by version. For translations, an evaluation suite scored LLM providers on cost and quality before settling on DeepSeek V4 Flash, now covering 52 languages plus right-to-left support.
The thinking behind that API: rather than bolting AI buttons onto the admin, Wagtail exposes 50+ admin operations with OpenAPI docs and Markdown rich text, drivable from curl, a script, or an MCP implementation. Worked examples include fixing SEO descriptions with an LLM and a generic content importer in about 100 lines.
Django Fellow Reports
Jacob Tyler Walls filed an early report before heading to DjangoCon US, with his usual prolificacy triaging three tickets, reviewing nine, and authoring seven. In addition, engaged with regular security reports and provided 1-1 mentoring to his GSoC mentee, Pravin.
Editors Note
All 3 Fellows are at DjangoCon US this week, so no formal report from Sarah or Natalia. All 3 also gave excellent talks that we will link to when the videos are available later this year.
Articles
Four ways to match misspelled and variant names, with the trade-offs spelled out. It expands on the author's DjangoCon US 2026 talk on search-as-you-type across 54 million names.
The slides and notes from Will Vincent's recent talk on deployments.
A helpful overview of Django's third-party package ecosystem, where to look, and how to apply it in your Django projects.
An opinionated guide on where to turn when Python feels too slow in your application (the answer isn't always switch to Rust).
CCP is moving EVE Online's 2.4 million lines of Python off Stackless Python 2.7, in place since 2010, with the first changes deployed on August 25. Stage one leans on automated tools to make the code compile under both versions: 95.9% of roughly 20,000 files already do, leaving about 3,300 blocking lines (1,500 print statements, 800 long literals like 123L, 600 old-style except clauses) and another 20,000 lines that compile but behave differently and need a human to look at each one.
A roundup of CPython development from August 5 to 27: Python 3.12.14, 3.11.16, and 3.10.21 shipped on the 12th, 3.15.0 release candidate 2 is due September 1, and six PEPs moved, including PEP 805 on safe parallel execution and PEP 833 reaching Final for the simple repository API. Most of the discussion energy went to the competing module export proposals in PEPs 842, 843, and 844.
Events
Five days of Django, Python, and community in Innsbruck, Austria, February 17–21, 2027.
Join us for five days of inspiration, education, and networking at the Riverside Convention Center in beautiful Riverside, California, September 13-17, 2027.
That Riverside conference needs people to run it, and more than 15 committees are recruiting, from program and sponsorship to Code of Conduct, A/V, website, and sprints. Leadership roles carry the heaviest load, with weekly check-ins and monthly board reports, but most positions do not require previous organizing experience: email [email protected] to volunteer.
Django Forum
A short forum thread appreciating Django's Fellows.
Podcasts
A special summer episode on the just-released 2026 Django Developers Survey, working through what it says about Django 6.1, HTMX, async, AI, deployment, testing, and Python tooling.
Django Job Board
Two foundation roles anchor the board this week, with the DSF hiring its first Executive Director and the PSF looking for a Security Developer, alongside two full stack engineering openings.
Full Stack Software Engineer (Hybrid) at Provision
Executive Director at Django Software Foundation
AI-Assisted Software Engineer, Web Applications at Logical Media Group
Security Developer at Python Software Foundation
Projects
Converts eligible if/elif/else chains into Python 3.10+ match statements, preserving runtime behavior and source formatting, including isinstance checks that become class patterns with attributes.
A Django Tasks backend which uses Celery as its underlying queue. Mentioned as part of the author's talk at DjangoCon US this week: Teach Django Tasks to speak Celery: Building a Celery backend for Django Tasks.