Issue 363: Wagtail's new API
| in blog | Django News |
|---|---|
| published date | 2026-11-13 |
| original entry | Issue 363: Wagtail's new API |
Wagtail 8.1's new API is built on Django Ninja rather than DRF, Python 3.16 alpha 2 makes uuid4() and uuid7() far faster, and Wagtail Space runs free and online next week.
News
Guido van Rossum shared the news that Tim Peters died on July 15. He wrote the Zen of Python (PEP 20) and gave Python Timsort, and as "Timbot" he answered countless questions and set the tone for early core development. Pythonistas are sharing their memories in the thread.
Wagtail CMS News
Wagtail's new API runs on Django Ninja, not DRF, and Sage Abdullah and Thibaud Colas explain why: schema generation is first-party rather than deprecated in favor of drf-spectacular, and Pydantic schemas follow the type hints Wagtail already uses.
Djangonaut Space News
Emanuel Jaimes explores Django ticket #26355, investigating previous implementation attempts and possible approaches to supporting PostgreSQL's array_append functionality in ArrayField.
Goodluck Igbokwe shares his journey to his first Django core commit, exploring ImageField validation and the importance of understanding the code behind the documentation.
Python Software Foundation
uuid4() and uuid7() now have C implementations and run 15-30x faster, re picked up nested character sets, and startup and garbage collection are quicker. Alpha 3 follows on December 15.
Each PyPI project now has a Security tab that shows whether a release has full provenance, meaning every file has an attestation, or none. The redesign also adds search and filters to the release files list, and shows file counts and yanked or quarantined status in the release history.
The PSF's new Infrastructure Engineer will spend his time cutting operational toil across python.org, PyPI, and the systems behind PyCon US. He has already started on Kubernetes cost savings.
Updates to Django
Today, "Updates to Django" is presented by Raffaella from Djangonaut Space! 🚀
Last week we had 17 pull requests merged into Django by 15 different contributors - including 8 first-time contributors! Congratulations to ines besrour, himanshu0870, ShabirAhmadLinux, Patel Namraa, Dmitry, Sahil Advani, Kunal Kumar and Hossein Shams for having their first commits merged into Django - welcome on board!
New in Django 6.2:
- An
input_typeof"textarea"was added to theTextareawidget. Like other widgets, when set to"hidden"it now renders thehiddenHTML attribute. (PR #21857) djangois now the preferred name for Django's command-line interface.django-adminremains available as an alias. Both names provide the same functionality. (PR #21260)
New in Django 6.1:
- Fixed a bug in Django 6.1 where accessing a deferred field with the
FETCH_PEERSfetch mode overwrote values that peer instances had already modified locally or loaded viarefresh_from_dbwith an explicitfieldsargument. The fix also addresses aKeyErrorwhen a peer's row had been deleted (#37436).
Django Fellow Reports
Between release blocker and security work, Jacob ran a small Trac sprint over Sarah's triage workflow changes and this year's Google Summer of Code dark mode project, and followed up with the GDAL maintainers on findings from the security releases. The main management command is now named django.
A four-day week spent mostly on triage and the "Ready for Checkin" backlog, accepting tickets on StepValueValidator crashing for large numbers, order_by("pk") on a union of composite-pk models, and NegatedExpression mishandling FullResultSet. She also enforced ticket assignment limits and triage restrictions in Trac.
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Articles
Ben Cardy's fourth class-based view post walks through FormView, which renders a form, validates it, and redirects on success.
Some examples of a team customizing the admin as needed for their specific use cases. A worthwhile effort if you use it heavily.
Adam Johnson's new package makes the file paths on Django's debug page clickable, opening your editor right at that line. When the editor is out of reach, in Docker or on a server, clicking copies the location instead.
A browser cannot send an Authorization header on a WebSocket handshake. The common fix puts the token in the query string, where every access log keeps a copy. This is the other way, and the four places it can quietly go wrong.
Ryan Cheley finally learned the OpenTofu that Django Commons runs on by importing his own AWS, Coolify, DigitalOcean, GitHub, Hetzner, and Tailscale setup.
Action tags can be moved, so a workflow pinned to a safe-looking tag can start running an attacker's code. Hugo van Kemenade walks through GitHub's new workflow lockfiles.
gilguard is a tiny, zero-dependency package for free-threaded Python (3.13t, 3.14t, 3.15t). Import it first. If any later import quietly turns the GIL back on, you get an error naming the extension module, the package that shipped it, and the line of your code that pulled it in.
uv maintainer Konstin walks through where uv still spends its time, from source distribution builds and network requests down to TOML parsing (about 30ms just to read Airflow's lockfile), hashing, NTFS, and memory allocation.
Events
Wagtail Space is next week, November 18-20. The event is 100% online and you can watch live or watch the recordings at your convenience. Expect talks from Wagtail and Django experts plus guest speakers on AI, sustainable tech, and other trends shaping the web. Tickets are free, so grab one before Wednesday.
Videos
Longtime Django developer Kenneth is the guest in this episode from Jon Gould at Foxley Talent. Lots of insights from coding in the pre/post AI world.
The video cut of Django Chat #209, just over an hour with Haki Benita on getting more out of the ORM and PostgreSQL indexes, where Django Ninja fits, and what Django still needs for typing and APIs. That last part is the ground DEP 0017 covers, adding content type parsing and a request.data attribute that handles JSON, and the forum thread has the wider debate.
Django Job Board
The PSF's CPython Developer in Residence opening is still accepting applications, alongside senior Python roles at Manychat in Barcelona and Proxify, plus a founding engineering role at Alloy.
CPython Developer in Residence at Python Software Foundation
Senior Python Engineer (Barcelona-based / Relocation support to Barcelona) at Manychat
Senior Backend Developer (Python) at Proxify AB
Founding Forward Deployed Engineer at Alloy
Projects
A playground for trying experimental Django features behind feature flags, installed as django.experimental.
Add @expose() to a Django model. Get a REST API.
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