Weeknotes (2026 week 33) Holidays and the heat wave I had four weeks of holidays this summer. The timing couldn’t have been much better with the heat wave – doing much thinking seems to be impossible anyway. I organized a multi-day feast with a few friends and with much help from others. We built up the site and installations over the course of multiple days and spent some days tearing…
Migrating from FeinCMS to feincms3 FeinCMS is still actively maintained, but development, bugfixes and new features mostly land on feincms3 and django-content-editor these days, not on FeinCMS itself. That’s reason enough to eventually move a project over. Someone asked on the feincms3 issue tracker whether there’s a guide for making that move. There isn’t one yet, so I thought…
Weeknotes (2026 week 27) The last entry in this series was published 10 weeks ago so it really is time for another review of the releases I did during this time. Releases feincms3-forms The feincms3-forms forms builder has gained a documentation page on the wonderful Read the Docs service. The 0.6.1 release doesn’t contain any code changes, just pyproject.toml updates and the mentioned…
The 2026 way of using importmaps in Django I last wrote about Django, JavaScript modules and importmaps in May 2025, slightly over a year ago. The main topic of this post is the django-js-asset 4.0 release. The library is used in many places, some of the more well-known packages using it are django-mptt and django-ckeditor . I have since done a lot of work evolving the ways of integrating…
«Anything new?» A lot of time has passed since I officially announced that I want to step down from maintaining django-mptt . I started contributing around 2009, tagged the 0.3 release in April 2010 , and have been the sole active maintainer since somewhere around 2019. The post about django-tree-queries has more background, but that’s not today’s topic. Stepping away isn’t easy…
Avoiding empty JavaScript files in CSS-only entrypoints from rspack builds I previously wrote about my preferred way of integrating Django with rspack . Minor aspects have changed, but most of it still applies. What changed The largest change is probably that I have switched from HtmlWebpackPlugin to rspack’s own HtmlRspackPlugin and have stopped configuring the template generated by it.…
Weeknotes (2026 week 17) I published the last entry near the beginning of March. I’m really starting to see a theme in my Weeknotes publishing schedule. Releases since the first weeks of March I’m trying out a longer-form version of those notes here than in the past. I think it’s worth going into some detail and not just listing releases with half a sentence each. feincms3-sites…
Switching all of my Python packages to PyPI trusted publishing As I have teased on Mastodon , I’m switching all of my packages to PyPI trusted publishing. I have been using it to release the django-debug-toolbar a few times but never set it up myself. The process seemed tedious. The malicious releases uploaded to PyPI two weeks ago and the blog post about digital attestations in pylock.toml…
LLMs for Open Source maintenance: a cautious case When ChatGPT appeared on the scene I was very annoyed at all the hype surrounding it. Since I’m working in the fast moving and low margin business of communication and campaigning agencies I’m surrounded by people eager to jump on the hype train when a tool promises to lessen the workload and take stuff from everyone’s plate.…
Weeknotes (2026 week 11) Last time I wrote that I seem to be publishing weeknotes monthly. Now, a quarter of a year has passed since the last entry . I do enjoy the fact that I have published more posts focused on a single topic. That said, what has been going on in open source land is certainly interesting too. LLMs in Open Source I have started a longer piece to think about my stance regarding…
Podcasts I like listening to (2026 edition) I have published another post like this almost two years ago . I like listening to podcasts even more than I did back then, when I only just started diving into this world. Sometimes I really like the silence. Other times, podcasts accompany my training regime, my chores and my (short) commute when I’m going to the office and not working from home.…
My 2025 in review I have been inspired by several posts where people reviewed the past year to write such a post too. Vacations I have been going snowboarding for the first time in many many years in February. I have been skiing and snowboarding a lot in my teens and twenties. After moving further away from the alps and also rupturing my cruciate ligament while playing Fussball (soccer) I have…
Rich text editors: How restrictive can we be? How restrictive should a rich text editor be? It’s a question I keep coming back to as I work on FeinCMS and Django-based content management systems. I published the last blog post on django-prose-editor specifically in August 2025, Menu improvements in django-prose-editor . The most interesting part of the blog post was the short mention of the…
Weeknotes (2025 week 49) I seem to be publishing weeknotes monthly, so I’m now thinking about renaming the category :-) Mosparo I have started using a self-hosted mosparo instance for my captcha needs. It’s nicer than Google reCAPTCHA. Also, not sending data to Google and not training AI models on traffic signs feels better. Fixes for the YouTube 153 error Simon Willison published a…
Thoughts about Django-based content management systems I have almost exclusively used Django for implementing content management systems (and other backends) since 2008. In this time, content management systems have come and gone. The big three systems many years back were django CMS , Mezzanine and our own FeinCMS . During all this time I have always kept an eye open for other CMS than our own…
Weeknotes (2025 week 45) Autumn is nice I love walking through the forest with all the colors and the rustling when you walk through the leaves on the ground. Updated packages since 2025-10-23 feincms3 5.4.3 : Small fix for the YouTube IFRAME; it seems that the referrerpolicy attribute is now necessary for the embed to work everywhere. django-json-schema-editor 0.8.2 : Allowed forwarding more…
Weeknotes (2025 week 43) I published the last weeknotes entry in the first half of September. Drama in OSS I have been following the Ruby gems debacle a bit. Initially at Feinheit we used our own PHP-based framework swisdk2 to build websites. This obviously didn’t scale and I was very annoyed with PHP, so I was looking for alternatives. I remember comparing Ruby on Rails and Django, and…
My favorite Django packages Inspired by other posts I also wanted to write up a list of my favorite Django packages. Since I’ve been working in this space for so long and since I’m maintaining quite a large list of packages I worry a bit about tooting my own horn too much here; that said, the reasons for choosing some packages hopefully speak for themselves. Also, I’m sure…
LLMs are making me a better programmer… I’m still undecided about LLMs for programming. Sometimes they are very useful, especially when working on a clearly stated problem within a delimited area. Cleaning the code up afterwards is painful and takes a long time though. Even for small changes I’m unsure if using LLMs is a way to save (any) resources, be it time, water, energy or…
Weeknotes (2025 week 37) I’m having a slow week after the last wisdom tooth extraction. Finally! I’m slowly recuperating from that. I’m trying to split up the blog posts a bit and writing more standalone pieces instead of putting everything into weeknotes. Publishing more focussed pieces sounds like a good thing and should also help me with finding my own writing later. Releases…