Built with Django Newsletter - 2025 Week 12
Hey, Happy Wednesday!
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Sponsors
This issue is sponsored by CodeRabbit an AI Code Reviewer that provides context-aware feedback, refactoring suggestions and highlights code security issues.
In plain terms, you finally get a senior level developer reviewing your code! The best news is that it is completely free for any public repo! If you ask them nicely they might even give you more stuff for free.
I've been using it to develop my projects, including this one and I can't recommend it enough. At the very least, you should give it a try and judge for yourself.
Projects
- CAD Software Hub - Your Complete CAD Software Directory
- Cabot - Self-hosted, easily-deployable monitoring and alerts service - like a lightweight PagerDuty
- Papermerge - Open Source Document Management System for Digital Archives (Scanned Documents)
- Flagsmith - Open Source Feature Flagging and Remote Config Service.
- People - User-centric and self-care teams management application
- Visio - Open source alternative to Google Meet and Zoom powered by LiveKit: HD video calls, screen sharing, and chat features.
- Docs - A collaborative note taking, wiki and documentation platform that scales.
Jobs
From the Community
- Smoke test your Django admin site by Justin Duke - The article explains how to test Django admin pages by rendering their empty state. It shows how to extract all route names from the admin site and run a parameterized pytest that logs in as a superuser. This approach helps catch magic-string errors before they affect end users.
- Serving Self-hosted Healthchecks Under a Path by Pēteris Caune - Healthchecks is built for both hosted use and self-hosting. Now you can run Healthchecks on a subpath by adding a path prefix to the SITE_ROOT setting. This update avoids complex URL rewriting and works well with common reverse proxies
- Ditching Django Admin for FastHTML with HTMX by Simon Moisselin - The author replaced Django Admin with a custom dashboard built using FastHTML and HTMX for better usability and monitoring of their online school. This new dashboard focuses on key metrics like daily active users and exercise attempts, providing a more intuitive experience with automatic refresh features. The simplified code and design allow for rapid development and easier management of complex data without the limitations of a general-purpose framework.
Top 3 links from last Issue
- RecodeQR - Create QR codes you can track & edit anytime
- Life in Weeks - Create a map of your life where each week is a little box.
- Django in government where Thibaud Colas shares a list of 50,000 Django projects, focusing on 88 countries that use Django for their government websites. Brazil, the USA, and Argentina have the highest number of Django sites, showcasing various notable examples from different countries. The dataset highlights the growing use of Django in the public sector, although there are gaps in representation from some countries.
Django Changes
Here is the list of changes that have been made to Django's codebase in the last week.
Overview
This month saw significant development in Django with 17 commits focusing on async functionality, documentation improvements, test reliability, and various bug fixes. The changes span core functionality, admin interface, and developer tooling, with a notable emphasis on async support and documentation clarity.
Key Changes and Features
Major Features: - Added async support to Django's Paginator class by wookkl) - Added trailing newlines to JSON serializer output by Tom Carrick)
Bug Fixes:
- Fixed duplicate automatic imports in shell command by hesham942)
- Restored
single_objectargument in LogEntry.objects.log_actions() by Adam Johnson) - Fixed template language handling of scientific notation by haileyajohnson)
Test Improvements:
- Enhanced Selenium test reliability with proper wait conditions by Sarah Boyce)
- Updated admin tests for Chrome WebDriver compatibility by Sarah Boyce)
Documentation Enhancements:
- Added guidance about persistent database connections in ASGI environments by Carlton Gibson)
- Added JSONField query documentation examples by Clifford Gama)
- Updated URLField default scheme documentation to HTTPS by Sarah Boyce)
Support
You can support this project by using one of the affiliate links below. These are always going to be projects I use and love! No "Bluehost" crap here!
- Buttondown - Email newsletter tool I use to send you this newsletter.
- Readwise - Best reading software company out there. I you want to up your e-reading game, this is definitely for you! It also so happens that I work for Readwise. Best company out there!
- Hetzner - IMHO the best place to buy a VPS or a server for your projects. I'll be doing a tutorial on how to use this in the future.
- SaaS Pegasus is one of the best (if not the best) ways to quickstart your Django Project. If you have a business idea but don't want to set up all the boring stuff (Auth, Payments, Workers, etc.) this is for you!