I just noticed that the website https://www.djangosites.org was shut down last week by its creator Ross Poulton with the article “Goodbye, Djangosites”.
I proposed removing the “Django-based sites” link from the Community page or other pages on the Django project website.
We can consider replacing the link with another one, but I’m asking you for suggestions.
Built with Django seems good but maybe a bit idle. There aren’t many dates on the site but I found the podcast was let out in 2022. @rasulkireev are you still maintaining it? Is there any way others could help with moderation etc?
When it comes to projects, I used to add them myself after I found something interesting, but then later decided to let users share themselves. I still add projects myself from time to time if I find anything interesting. There weren’t too many project submissions lately, but if anything comes in, I usually review it straight away.
As for the podcast, the editing took so much time that I got a little discouraged. In fact I have another completed podcast that I can’t publish because I can’t get around to editing it.
The other component of this site is the Articles / Tutorials. My intention is to write more, in fact that’s one of my big goals for this year.
All of this to say is that I intend to keep BwD alive and active, just that sometimes life gets in the way.
Thanks a ton for the offer to help with maintaining! I have never worked with anyone on my side projects, so nothing jumps at me to get help with (yet). The site is open source though if anyone is curios (initially this was a vehicle to learn Django for me).
P.S. I think this is important for the discussion here. Another goal for me this year was to produce a good quality Django book (and possibly a video course) that I could sell on the website. This may be something that dissuades you from adding BwD to Django’s Community Page. Thought it would be important to bring up.
P.P.S. Whatever you decide I will continue to try my best to highlight awesome projects people build with django and will try my best to provide useful content for interested people, just like you do @adamchainz and @pauloxnet. Thankful for all the work that you do, you both have been a big part of my “becoming and engineer” journey.
The link is to Django’s “Overview” page, highlighting the “Sites using Django” section: Django overview | Django Using Django (the highlighting only works in Chrome-based browsers). (I think it may have been broken for you or blocked because it was an Arc browser redirect, ugh, tracking.)
I never knew about this section. It’s certainly underdeveloped. I like the visual impression of the screenshots in the Built with Django project list, which is hard to build and maintain.
btw, @adamchainz and @pauloxnet , thanks for bringing this up. Ever since you started the topic a few people already volunteered to contribute. Feels surreal! Now have a whole new skillset to develop
If we stick to the external website, we should remove the section from the overview page to avoid confusion.
@adamchainz I agree the screenshots look better, but it also adds friction to add a Django powered website. Here, we have a bigger community that can review and accept (or remove) submissions way more easily.
I think the list of links in text plain with a short text description will work (no screenshots).
I don’t think it makes sense to list all the projects built with django, but the most notable ones. That wold be easier to manage and would provide all the info people are usually looking for “is Django scalable?” & “what can I do with Django?”
How would we promote this idea for people to start contributing?
This is the exact problem with relying on other sites for this kind of content. We should have it on our own. It makes it look like Django is too old or abandoned, which is the very opposite of what we want to do.
We should only have a list of sites (notables or not) and ask people in there to contribute to the list.