Djangonaut Space Session 5: Small Fixes, Big Impact in django CMS
This is Mar Bartolome and Vanessa Bedzra from the Djangonauts Space program which is run bi-annually by the Django community as an initiative to ease the onboarding of new code contributors and boost community involvement.
Also this fall, django CMS is a participant in the program. Delving into the program's space metaphor we wish to report progress of the Team Mercury's space mission!
For session 5, running October-November 2025, the participant Djangonauts have pushed a series of exciting contributions in the django CMS ecosystem.
UI and documentation improvements in djangocms-frontend
Mar started by triaging a long-stanging bug on image resizing in djangocms-frontend What looked apparently as an easy picking turned out to be nothing but: a deeper issue with wrong assumptions on how easy_thumbnailsresizes images was discovered, which turns out to be the source of awkward behaviors in several places. The bug falls out of the scope of the Djangonauts program, but Mar has worked on a UI improvement around image resizing, which is now simpler and more intuitive, and will lead to less manifestations of the bug.
There's new a new "Sizing" tab in the built-in image plugin, replacing the "Cropping" tab.
As part of the onboarding process, some shortcomings on the project documentation were also noticed, and promptly actioned upon. The docs now make a clearer distinction between template components and form-based components, whereas previously both were referred as frontend components indistinctly. You only get to really test the effectiveness of any introductory documentation once, when you're brand new to the project - so this was a great chance to provide fresh feedback and improvements on it.
Language menu improvements on djangocms-versioning
Vanessa, on her part, worked on what initially looked like a bug in the djangocms-versioning language menu: the language menu was awkwardly showing with just one language when there wasn't any other translations, making it essentially useless.
After an initial fix where the menu was dropped completely, Fabian realized that it would be better for it to actually get displayed, but with the options to add and remove translations directly within the menu:
And so, the bugfix was turned into a feature: now the process of managing page translations can be done directly from the page preview, which is leaner and more straightforward than having to do it from the admin panel.
And other minor fixes
Both of us have been proactive in fixing or documenting other minor issues encountered during the program. For example, a dependencies issue on djangocms-versioning, further documentation improvement proposals, or a minor bug around tab titles in djangocms-frontend (which got a very promptly fix).
Closing thoughts
It's been a fun and rewarding experience for both of us: we experienced how to collaborate effectively in an established open source project, picked up some dev-fu along the way, got to work along some very interesting people, and our efforts are now part of a tool that will be used by thousands of people – and keep being improved upon, thanks to the magic of open source.
We want to offer a sincere thank you to the Djangonauts program and the django CMS project, and in particular to our navigator Fabian, for making this experience possible.
