Simon Willison’s Weblog

Exciting developments with Django

3rd August 2005

The amount of activity surrounding the Django web framework since its not-quite release a few weeks ago is amazing. Adrian, Jacob and Wilson have been working over-time, with 395 check-ins to source control since the 13th of July. They’ve added WSGI support, a development web server, unit-tests, a ton of documentation, SQLite support, database introspection and dozens of other feature tweaks and bug fixes. Check out the project Timeline for an idea of just how frenetic things have been.

The emerging Django community has been kicking in as well. There’s a significant community-led initiative to get internationalisation and localisation going, and a wide number of unofficial tutorials have emerged to complement the one on the site.

Here’s where things get really interesting: changes at the Journal-World have kick-started the Django job market. Rob Curley, formally in charge of the World Company’s web activities, recently took up a new position at the Naples Daily News in Florida. Rob just hired Eric Moritz, a regular on the #django IRC channel, to work on Django-powered projects there.

Meanwhile, Adrian Holovaty has taken a new job at the Washington Post as “Editor, Editorial Innovations”—a role that is sure to involve some very innovative use of Django (Adrian built chicagocrime.org). Adrian’s departure means that the Journal-World are looking for a new developer—here’s why you should apply.

One thing’s for certain: we’re going to see some very exciting Django-powered sites in the next few months.