Writing Updates to Django for Django News

"Updates to Django" is a section in the Django News that has a small overview of what's happened in the past week of contributions to Django core (incl. interesting discussions).

Formatting:

Updates to Django is written using markdown. Check the markdown cheatsheet.

Wrap your markdown with triple backticks (```), this way it won't render and will stay visible as raw markdown.

Timeline:

• Each week this needs to be done by Wednesday (first half), and posted in django-news forum channel.
• This gives enough time to everyone to get the post reviewed, since most of us are on a different timezone.
• The hard deadline for a volunteer to put the content on Newsletter is Thursday 12:00 UTC for it to be published on Friday.

Format:

• You can check the last week’s issue here, while looking to a couple of issues you might find a rough format, the start paragraph talks about PRs, contributors, new contributor’s count and celebrating their first commits merged into Django.
• The rest is whatever is worth noting could be interesting discussion on the django forms, gist from a session conducted by contributors like Django roadmap or a mention of your favorite feature MR finally being merged into the codebase. It’s really anything and everything that you think is worth mentioning/celebrating goes here.

How to submit:

• Write the section in markdown.
• Share the draft in the django-news channel on discord, create a thread with the Updates to Django #IssueNumber.
• Currently Raffaella and Pradhvan have access to the platform for queuing up the issue, if both of them are not available you can ping Sarah Boyce to get the issue queue up for the newsletter.

Tips on choosing which PR to focus on

PRs that can be prioritized:

• new features for the upcoming feature release (6.0),
• deprecations for the upcoming feature release (6.0),
• large document improvements such as a new accessibility section or topic or reference docs page, performance improvements, tickets that are particularly old.

PRs that can be excluded in the draft:

• Fixes included in the minor monthly release, minor docs changes (a new note, etc)
• Something that is so difficult to explain the context to it doesn't really fit in one bullet point (unless this is a "major" thing)

Tips on selecting the topics:

• To automate how many PRs got merged in a particular week and find out which one of those PRs are by first time contributors, our fellow Djangonaut, Moe have written a script that you check. It gives you a list of merged PRs of last week so it’s easier to filter.
• From what got merged the previous week we want to pick out the more interesting stuff, usually new features or depreciation (both of these have release notes). Try to pick 2-3 from it that you think are interesting.
• Tickets in Django might take time close. If a ticket is very old and it gets completed, It would be nice to celebrate all the contributors to it (as it's usually a team effort) and highlight them in the newsletter.
• Django Forms and the official Discord channel of Django are both great places to find out interesting discussions happening.
  • For Django Forms, filtering latest, top or top topics on Django Internals might help you discover a fun topic conversation that can be featured in the issue.
  • Discord on the other hand might be too big to keep watch if you have just joined. To get started you can always check out #contributor-discussion to find some interesting threads.
• Google Summer of Code(GSoC), Djangonaut Space or any other community programs where Django takes part is always a good mention.

Remember to have fun while writing it, you don’t have to follow all the tips. The main aim here is to learn what’s happening in your community, highlighting wins from your fellow community members and give back to the community.

Happy writing 💜