Farewell, Djangosites

Time for something new to take it’s place.

Posted by Ross Poulton on Tue 23 January 2024 #django #djangosites

The time has come for me to shut down Djangosites.org. This will happen in late January, 2024.

When I started Djangosites back in 2007, Django was still a relatively young platform (having been an open-source project for only a few years) and besides the Lawrence Journal-World there were few publicly-documented ‘large’ deployments of Django. A number of sites such as Disqus started sharing details about their Django usage, but there still seemed to be a vibe of “Is Django Ready for Prime Time?”

The answer to me and others in the community was a resounding “yes”, but still people wanted to see what had been built with and what was possible with Django. This led to the DjangoPoweredSites Wiki page, a bullet-point list of websites with very little detail.

So Djangosites was born. A very web-2.0, user-generated-content site (built with Django of course) to let people show off what they’d done with Django.

As I sit here in early 2024 I am no longer a user of Django and no longer part of the community. I miss being involved, but don’t think it’s right for an ‘outsider’ to drive an important community resource. Reviewing and approving the (huge!) backlog of submissions, mostly spam, has fallen far from the top of my to-do list and this gives me shitty guilt on a semi regular basis.

The good news is that there is a much better designed, actively maintained, broader resource that was built by Rasul Kireev: Built with Django has a great list of projects that the community can contribute to along with tutorials and other Django content.

I loved being a part of the burgeoning Django community back in the late 2000s and early 2010s, and I’m proud to see the framework grow to do things that I won’t even pretend to understand (what’s a websocket, anyway?). Time for me to finally acknowledge what I think I’ve known for a few years - I’m no longer a Django user and I shouldn’t be steward of Djangosites.

Thanks to those who have submitted sites, those who have sent in corrections or updates, those who asked questions, and most of all thanks to those who learned something from the site and reached out to tell me.

Cover photo: A GitHub screengrab of the core Djangosites Website model. It was last edited 11 years ago which feels pretty telling!