DjangoCMS fellow for 6 months - what a journey it's been so far!
Since September, I’ve had the honor of being the first “django CMS Fellow”, a position the django CMS Association created to help facilitate django CMS development process.
And man, it has been a journey.
Django CMS 4 has been under development for quite some time. Its first installment, django CMS 4.0, now has been running at a large corporation for many years extremely reliably. To get the first community edition ready for release nevertheless was and still is a major effort. I am quite proud of the progress we’ve been making. End of December we published a first release candidate for the community edition django CMS 4.1, and I expect a second (and hopefully final) release candidate soon.
Django CMS 4 comes with its set of powerful apps:
- Powerful versioning,
- a solid alias concept (replacing static placeholders), and
- optional moderation rules.
Most of these apps needed and did grow along with django CMS 4.1 and are getting ready for their first pypi releases.
At the same time, first Django 4.0, and then Django 4.1 and 4.2 were introduced. All three versions required updates on quite a few django CMS repositories. It’s good to see Django making such massive progress, but it is a significant effort for the community to keep all packages moving along.
On a personal note, I must say that the fellowship program brought back a lot more coding than I thought. I’ve been coding Python and a little JavaScript now and then, but this took me to the next learning curve. I saw plenty of other people’s code and despite everyone trying to be pythonic I realized there are so many more smart ways of doing things.
Moreover, as I have occasionally stated also elsewhere, I really appreciate the django CMS community. We have people who have barely worked with django CMS and have taken responsibility for an old django CMS project. They now need a quick start on how to upgrade their django CMS stack and turn the old, abandoned project into a new, shiny and manageable website. We also have early adopters who work with the latest development releases of django CMS 4 and require support with the newest changes. All these people help each other out and form a vivid community.
So, mission accomplished?
Not quite yet. For me, that’s 6 more months to go. I am excited to bring django CMS 4.1 to you. Furthermore, I would like to invite you to even more actively support the community. You chose: Helping out people on slack, responding to issues, creating pull requests.
The opportunity seems endless…
