Only a few days remain to support the Django Software Foundation through our annual JetBrains fundraiser. You can now use the offer for new purchases and annual renewals. If your PyCharm Professional subscription expires this year, this is a great time to renew or extend it for up to 12 months. Get 30% off PyCharm Professional, and 100% of proceeds from qualifying purchases and renewals go to the DSF to help fund Django Fellows, community programs, events, and the future of Django. 👉 Offer ends May 1: Learn more about the fundraiser 👉 Claim 30% off here: Get the JetBrains offer

If you've felt like djangoproject.com could use a refresh, you're not alone. The site has served the community well for a long time, it’s beloved by a lot of people but doesn’t reflect where Django is today or who we want to reach. We've been working on a redesign behind the scenes, and we want to share where we're headed and how you can get involved. Why a redesign The case has been building for a while. The excellent user research report from 20tab documented in detail what current site users struggle with, and the more recent community discussion on homepage redesigns on the forum focuses on the image issue. In her recent talk Debunking Django Myths, Sarah Boyce, one of our Django Fellows who helps maintain the project, walked through the gap between how Django is perceived and what it actually offers in 2026. Our website is one of the places where the gap is widest, and we need to close it. Debunking Django Myths - Sarah Boyce @ Python Unplugged on PyTV It’s harder than it looks on the surface, as it’s essential the site serves both as a showcase of the value of Django for newcomers; and as a central information space for our users; and as an online and in-person community hub; and a fundraising and sustainability tool for our Django Software Foundation. How we're approaching this We're planning the work in three phases. Discovery and groundwork. This is where we’re at right now. Before anything gets designed, we need clarity on what the site should communicate: Django's value, who we're speaking to, and what success looks like. That means a marketing strategy (at least bigger-picture). Possibly additional user research focused on new users. Definitely site analytics so we know how different aspects of the site are working. And a redesign brief we can share with UX and visual design experts. We also need to be building up capacity in UX, Information Architecture (IA), and marketing, since those areas of expertise are essential for the success of the website but not well represented in our working groups. Design. From there we'll move into IA, mockups, and low-fidelity prototypes. We expect this visual work will be component-driven, producing a small design system and pattern library that can support a section-by-section rollout rather than a big-bang launch. The homepage is the most visible surface and a natural focus, but it might be easier for our volunteers to first look at more specific sections (docs, donation flows, community) before tackling the more complex multi-purpose areas. Build. For that, we want to work with our existing volunteer contributors as much as possible, so implementation will be incremental against mockups that reflect the long-term goal. This keeps the site working and evolving while we make progress on the design. Who's doing the work We hope to do most of this with existing volunteers. The Website working group, the Accessibility team, and the Social Media working group. Working with paid contractors for specific tasks if Django Software Foundation finances allow. A project this size really needs both: the continuity of volunteers who know Django and our community and Foundation, and focused professional time for the pieces that need it. Where you come in If you have relevant experience in any of the following, we'd genuinely love to hear from you: UX and interaction design User research Visual design Information Architecture, content strategy, or copywriting Marketing Check out the Django forum thread we’re using for ongoing updates, come say hi in DMs, or chime in on the tracking issue for this work. Our Discord server is a good place to reach out too. And separately - a good redesign will cost real money. We'd like some of this work to be handled by paid contractors where it makes sense, and that depends on what the Foundation can afford. If you're in a position to support the DSF financially, it directly helps us make that possible. Thanks for caring about this! Let's make djangoproject.com as good as the framework and community it represents.

For April 2026, we welcome Rob Hudson as our DSF member of the month! ⭐ Rob is the creator of django-debug-toolbar (DDT), a tool used by more than 100 000 folks in the world. He introduces Content-Security-Policy (CSP) support in Django and contribute to many open source packages. He has been a DSF member since February 2024. You can learn more about Rob by visiting Rob's website and his GitHub Profile. Let’s spend some time getting to know Rob better! Can you tell us a little about yourself I'm a backend Python engineer based in Oregon, USA. I studied biochemistry in college, where software was just a curiosity and hobby on the side, but I'm grateful that my curiosity turned into a career in tech. My earliest memory of that curiosity was taking apart my Speak & Spell as a kid to see how it worked and never quite getting it back together again. How did you start using Django? I followed the path of the "P"s: Perl, then PHP, then Python. When Ruby on Rails arrived it was getting a lot of attention, but I was already enjoying Python, so when Django was announced I was immediately drawn to it. I started building small apps on my own, then eventually led a broader tech stack modernization at work, a health education company where we were building database-driven learning experiences with quizzes and a choose-your-own-adventure flow through health content. Django, Git, and GitHub all came together around that same time as part of that transition. Fun fact: my GitHub user ID is 1106. What other framework do you know and if there is anything you would like to have in Django if you had magical powers? I've been building a few projects with FastAPI lately and have really come to appreciate the type-based approach to validation via Pydantic. The way typing syntax influences the validation logic is something I'd love to see influence Django more over time. Erlang has a feature called the crash dump: when something goes wrong, the runtime writes out the full state of every process to a file you can open and inspect after the fact. As someone who built a debug toolbar because I wanted to see what was going on under the hood. Being provided a freeze frame of the exact moment things went wrong, full state intact, ready to inspect sounds like magic. The Rust-based tooling emerging in the Python ecosystem is fascinating to watch. Tools like uv, ruff, and efforts around template engines, JSON encoders, ASGI servers, etc. The potential for significant speed improvements without losing what makes Django Django is an interesting space. What projects are you working on now? I have a couple of personal fintech projects I'm playing with, one using FastAPI and one using Django. I've been enjoying exploring and wiring up django-bolt for the Django project. I'm impressed with the speed and developer friendliness. On the django-debug-toolbar front, I recently contributed a cache storage backend and have a longer term idea to add an API layer and a TUI interface that I'd love to get back to working on someday. Which Django libraries are your favorite (core or 3rd party)? Django Debug Toolbar (I may be slightly biased). Beyond that: whitenoise and dj-database-url are great examples of libraries that do one thing well and get out of your way. I'd also add granian, a Rust-based ASGI server. And django-allauth, which I'm somehow only just trying for the first time. For settings management I've cycled through a few libraries over the years and am currently eyeing pydantic-settings for a 12-factor approach to configuration. What are the top three things in Django that you like? The community. I've been part of it for a long time and it has a quality that's hard to put into words. It feels close knit, genuinely welcoming to newcomers, and there's a rising tide lifts all boats mentality that I don't think you find everywhere. People care about helping each other succeed. The sprints and hallway track at DjangoCon have been a wonderful extension of that. The ORM. Coming from writing a lot of raw SQL, I appreciate the syntax of Django's ORM which hits a sweet spot of simplicity and power for most use cases. Stability, documentation, and the batteries included philosophy. I appreciate a framework that at its core doesn't chase trends, has a predictable release cycle, amazingly well written docs (which makes sense coming from its journalism background), and there's enough built in to get surprisingly far without reaching for third party packages. You are the creator of Django Debug Toolbar, this tool is really popular! What made you create the tool and publish the package? The inspiration came from Symfony, a PHP framework that had a debug toolbar built in. At the time, I was evaluating frameworks for a tech stack transition at work and thought, why doesn't Django have one of these? So I started hacking on a simple middleware that collected basic stats and SQL queries and injected the toolbar HTML into the rendered page. The first commit was August 2008. The SQL piece was personally important. Coming from PHP where I wrote a lot of raw SQL by hand, I wanted to see what the ORM was actually generating. The nudge to actually release it came at the first DjangoCon in 2008 at Google's headquarters. Cal Henderson gave a keynote called "Why I Hate Django" and showed a screenshot of Pownce's debug toolbar in the page header, then talked about internal tooling at Flickr similar to what the Django debug toolbar has currently. Seeing those motivated me to tweet out what I was working on that same day. Apparently I wasn't the only one who wanted to see what the ORM was doing. It has been created in 2008, what are your reflections on it after so many years? Mostly gratitude. I had a young family at the time and life got busy, so I stepped back from active maintenance earlier than I would have liked. Watching it flourish under the maintainers who stepped up has been really wonderful to see. They've improved it, kept up with releases, supported the community, and have done a better job of it than I was in a position to do at the time, so I'm grateful to all who carried the torch. At this point I contribute to it like any other project, which might sound strange for something I created, but it's grown bigger than my early involvement and that feels right. I still follow along and it makes me happy to see it continuing to grow and evolve. What I didn't anticipate was what it gave back. It helped launch my career as a Django backend developer and I'm fairly certain it played a role in landing me a job at Mozilla. All from of a middleware I hacked together just to see what the ORM was doing. Being a maintainer is not always easy despite the fact it can be really amazing. Do you have any advice for current and future maintainers in open source? For what it's worth, what worked for me was building things for fun and to learn rather than setting out to build something popular. I also didn't worry too much about perfection or polish early on. If life gets busy or your interests move on, I'd say trust the community. Have fun, and if it stops being fun, find some enthusiastic people who still think it's fun and hand it to them gracefully. That worked out better than I could have hoped in my case. I'm genuinely curious about how AI changes open source. If simple utilities can be generated on the fly rather than installed as packages, what does that mean for small focused libraries? My hope is that the value of open source was never just the code anyway. The collaboration, the issue discussions, the relationships. AI can generate code but it can't replicate those things. One thing I've noticed is newer developers using AI to generate patches they don't fully understand and submitting them as contributions. I get the impulse, but I'd encourage using AI as a tool for curiosity rather than a shortcut. Let it suggest a fix, then dig into why it works, ask it questions, iterate, which is something I often do myself. You have introduced CSP support in Django core, congratulations and thank you for this addition! How did the process of creating this contribution go for you? I picked up django-csp at Mozilla because it had become unmaintained and was a blocker from upgrading to newer Python and Django versions. What started as a simple maintenance task turned into a bit of a yak shave, but a good one. Getting up to speed on CSP led to ticket triage, which led to a refactor, which eventually led me to a 14 year old Django issue requesting CSP in core. Once the refactor was done I made the mistake of actually reading that 14 year old ticket and then felt personally responsible for it. The more I worked in the space the clearer the ecosystem problem became. As a third party package, django-csp couldn't provide a standardized API that other packages could reliably depend on. If a third party library needed to add nonces to their own templates, they couldn't assume django-csp was installed. Seeing that friction play out in projects like debug toolbar and Wagtail convinced me that CSP support made sense in core. Working with the Django fellows through the process was a genuine pleasure and I have enormous respect for what they do. They are patient, kind, and shaped what landed in core immensely. What surprised me most was how much they handle behind the scenes and how gracefully they manage the constant demands on their attention. Huge props to Natalia in particular for guiding a large and complex feature through to completion. Do you remember your first contribution to open source? Before Django I'd been tinkering on the web for years. I built tastybrew, an online homebrew recipe calculator and sharing site, partly to scratch my own itch and partly to get deeper with PHP and hosting my own projects. Back then open source collaboration wasn't what it is today. Before GitHub there was Freshmeat, SourceForge, emailed patches, maybe your own server with a tarball to download. My first Django contribution was a small fix to the password reset view in 2006. Over the next several years there were around 40 or so contributions like docs corrections, admin improvements, email handling, security fixes. Contributing felt natural because the code was open and the community was welcoming. I joined Mozilla in 2011 and shifted focus for a while. Mozilla was quietly contributing quite a bit back to the Django ecosystem during those years, with many 3rd party Django libraries, like django-csp. One of my favorite open source contributions was when I collaborated with a colleague on a Python DSL for Elasticsearch that eventually became the basis for Elastic's official Python client. What are your hobbies or what do you do when you’re not working? Reading, cooking, and getting outside when I can. I try to eat a whole food plant based diet and enjoy cooking in that style. Not sure it counts as a hobby but I enjoy wandering grocery stores, browsing what's new, reading ingredients, curious about flavors, thinking about what I could recreate at home. Getting away from screens is important to me. Gardening, hiking, camping, long walks, travel when possible. Petrichor after rain. Puzzles while listening to audiobooks or podcasts. I brew oolong tea every day, a quiet ritual where the only notification is my tea timer. Code has always felt more like curiosity than work to me, so I'm not sure where hobby ends and the rest begins. Anything else you'd like to share? If you have a Django codebase that needs some love, I'm available for contract work. I genuinely enjoy the unglamorous stuff: upgrading legacy codebases, adding CSP support, and refactoring for simplicity and long term maintainability. There's something satisfying about stepping back, seeing the bigger picture, and leaving things cleaner than you found them. You can find me on GitHub at robhudson. Doing this interview was a nice way to reflect on my career. I can see that curiosity and adaptation have been pretty good companions. I'm grateful Django and its community have been a big part of that journey. Thank you for doing the interview, Rob !

Hello Django community, The Steering Council is excited to share our proposed new technical governance and ask for your feedback. Last year we suspended the formal voting process of the Steering Council. The updates we’re proposing would bring how we’ve been operating into alignment with the written governance. From the motivation section: This is a revisitation of Django's technical governance in which a simplification and reduction was made to make it more approachable to more people. The goals of these changes are the following: Make it easier to enact our governance. Make it easier for others to understand our governance. Make the governance more flexible, allowing more action with less procedure. You can read DEP 0019 here. Adoption plan The goal is to have this governance accepted and in place by 2026-07-01. Our timeline is as follows, but may change depending on feedback. 2026-04-16: Announce new technical governance, solicit feedback 2026-05-07: Merge in minor feedback changes 2026-05-28: Resolve major feedback concerns 2026-06-11: Steering Council and DSF Board vote on and approve DEP What we need from you We would like to know if we are achieving our goals with this document. For example, do you feel that this makes our governance easier to understand, do you feel like you have a better understanding of who is eligible to run for the Steering Council, is it clear how Django operates from a process perspective? Beyond that, if you have other feedback around the changes, please share it. This has gone through a high degree of review from the Steering Council and Board over the past 5 months, but that doesn’t mean there aren't areas where it can be improved. Anyone can participate in this process on the Forum thread here.

For another year, we are thrilled to partner with our friends at JetBrains on the annual "Buy PyCharm, Support Django" campaign. This is the first of two fundraisers we're running with JetBrains this year, and it's one of the most impactful ways the community can support the Django Software Foundation. "JetBrains is a cornerstone in the Django community, consistently helping us understand our evolving landscape. Their annual survey provides invaluable insights into the community's needs, trends, and tools, ensuring we stay on the pulse of what matters most." Jeff Triplett, President, Django Software Foundation Your support of this campaign helps fund key initiatives such as: Django Fellows: Ensuring the rapid development and maintenance of Django. Djangonaut Space: Onboarding new contributors to the Django project. Django Girls: Making the Django community accessible to programming beginners around the world. International events and conferences: Supporting DjangoCons, one-day events, meetups, and other community gatherings around the world. How the campaign works From today to May 1, when you purchase PyCharm at a 30% discount through our special campaign link, JetBrains will donate an equal amount to the Django Software Foundation. You get a professional IDE that's trusted by Django developers worldwide, and the DSF receives a matched contribution. Get 30% off PyCharm, Support Django Thank you, JetBrains Beyond this campaign, JetBrains contributes to the Django ecosystem in ways that are easy to overlook but hard to overstate. Their Django Developers Survey, State of Django report, and broader Python Developers Survey give the entire community a clearer picture of where Django and Python are heading each year. "JetBrains is one of our most generous fundraising partners year after year, helping us sustain and grow the Django ecosystem. We deeply appreciate their commitment, leadership, and collaboration." Thank you to JetBrains for another year of partnership, and thank you to everyone who participates in this campaign. Together, we can ensure the continued success and growth of the framework we all rely on. Other ways to donate If you would like to donate in another way, especially if you are already a PyCharm customer, here are other ways to donate to the DSF: On our website via credit card Via GitHub Sponsors Benevity Workplace Giving Program - If your employer participates, you can make donations to the DSF via payroll deduction. For those able to make a larger donation as corporate sponsors ($2000+), check out our corporate sponsors form

We’re excited to announce that Django has officially adopted Contributor Covenant 3 as our new Code of Conduct! This milestone represents the completion of a careful, community-driven process that began earlier this year. What We’ve Accomplished Back in February, we announced our plan to adopt Contributor Covenant 3 through a transparent, multi-step process. Today, we’re proud to share that we’ve completed all three steps: Step 1 (Completed February 2026): Established a community-driven process for proposing and reviewing changes to our Code of Conduct. Step 2 (Completed March 2026): Updated our Enforcement Manual, Reporting Guidelines, and FAQs to align with Contributor Covenant 3 and incorporate lessons learned from our working group’s experience. Step 3 (Completed April 2026): Adopted the Contributor Covenant 3 with Django-specific enhancements. Why Contributor Covenant 3? Contributor Covenant 3 represents a significant evolution in community standards, incorporating years of experience from communities around the world. The new version: Centers impact over intent, recognizing that even unintentional harm requires accountability and repair Emphasizes consent and boundaries, making explicit that community members must respect stated boundaries immediately Addresses modern harassment patterns like sea-lioning, coordinated harassment, and microaggressions Includes clearer guidance on enforcement, transparency, and accountability By adopting this widely-used standard, Django joins a global community of projects committed to fostering welcoming, inclusive spaces for everyone. What’s New in Django’s Code of Conduct While we’ve adopted Contributor Covenant 3 as our foundation, we’ve also made Django-specific enhancements: In-person event guidance: Added requirements and best practices for Code of Conduct points of contact at Django events Affiliated programs documentation: Clarified scope and expectations for programs that reference Django’s Code of Conduct Bad-faith reporting provisions: Added protections against misuse of the reporting process Escalation processes: Established clear procedures for handling disagreements between working groups Enhanced transparency: Updated our statistics and reporting to provide better visibility into how we enforce our Code of Conduct You can view the complete changelog of changes at our Code of Conduct repository. Community-Driven Process This adoption represents months of collaborative work. The Code of Conduct Working Group reviewed community feedback, consulted with the DSF Board, and incorporated insights from our enforcement experience. Each step was completed through pull requests that were open for community review and discussion. We’re grateful to everyone who participated in this process—whether by opening issues, commenting on pull requests, joining forum discussions, or simply taking the time to review and understand the changes. Where to Find Everything All of our Code of Conduct documentation is available on both djangoproject.com and our GitHub repository: Code of Conduct: djangoproject.com/conduct Reporting Guidelines: djangoproject.com/conduct/reporting Enforcement Manual: djangoproject.com/conduct/enforcement-manual FAQs: djangoproject.com/conduct/faq GitHub Repository: github.com/django/code-of-conduct How You Can Continue to Help The Code of Conduct is a living document that will continue to evolve with our community’s needs: Propose changes: Anyone can open an issue to suggest improvements Join discussions: Participate in community conversations on the Django forum, Discord, or DSF Slack Report violations: If you experience or witness a Code of Conduct violation, please report it to conduct@djangoproject.com Stay informed: Watch the Code of Conduct repository for updates Thank You Creating a truly welcoming and inclusive community is ongoing work that requires participation from all of us. Thank you for being part of Django’s community and for your commitment to making it a safe, respectful space where everyone can contribute and thrive. If you have questions about the new Code of Conduct or our processes, please don’t hesitate to reach out to the Code of Conduct Working Group at conduct@djangoproject.com. Posted by Dan Ryan on behalf of the Django Code of Conduct Working Group