Data on the number of releases comes from ecosyste.ms which was very convenient to do this while comparing with other packages outside PyPI. For what it’s worth, Rails is at 510 on there, which I believe is all releases since 2004. And Laravel is at 247 but there’s 2-3 years missing
it’s my 1st attempt at reporting on CI downloads specifically. Interpreting this is more of an art than a science, I’d love to hear if others have ideas on what to do with this data!
for me the surprise is the pace? I’d expect people to be more set in their tools that it takes longer than a few months for a new tool, no matter how good, to become the majority use one. Though perhaps people adopt new tools more easily in CI where install times matter more
Between this and the relative color syntax, looks like much cleverer theming options are on the way, yay for more control for end users. For anyone discovering APCA, aside from it giving better results, I’ve also found it super interesting to read about the logic behind the algorithm. The Easy Intro mentioned in the article (https://git.apcacontrast.com/documentation/APCAeasyIntro) is well worth the time and it has all the relevant follow-up resources.
ty! We have no plans to rewrite Wagtail in Rust but I hope there’s ways in which we can make the developer experience better, particularly around dependencies management
yep, I really appreciate their current efforts, but still think it’s a point of concern. Feels risky to have so much of an ecosystem resting on so few people (bus factor, governance, etc). Hopefully with Astral being a for-profit business they’ll find ways for their work to be more sustainable than other package managers’ maintainers.
A lot of Wagtail usage is with Poetry. Tends to be projects with 30-50 dependencies. It "just works" but we see a lot of people struggle with common tasks ("how do I upgrade this package"), and complain about how slow it is. I don’t have big insights outside of Wagtail users but I don’t think it’s too different.
With the caveat I only have the package installers usage data for Wagtail downloads – pdm usage has fallen off a cliff, from 0.2% of downloads in January 2024, to 0.01% in January 2025. Roughly matches the uptake of uv.
Doesn’t make pdm bad in itself but that means there’ll be fewer pdm users around to report bugs, potentially fewer contributors to it too, fewer resources, etc.
Sure – and I think it’s certainly proving to be a good thing so far! My concerns are more longer-term. I see two primarily:
(1) As uv’s governance is driven by a for-profit company, I see incentives that will eventually compromise on its benefits.
(2) Python packaging has historically been very fragmented, and more recently there’s been lots of work on standardization. That work will be impacted when users massively shift to one package installer.
Neither of those things are clear negatives, but they’re worth being aware of.
Well, seems like 100% what’s going to happen (for the majority of Wagtail users at least) if the current trend continues. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing to be frank. But we’ll have to adjust regardless.
See the proposed moveBefore API [1] which is meant to solve those issues at the platform level. In the meantime, htmx has their morphdom extension, which I’d say is a must when replacing any page content with interactive elements within. Aside from that one major gotcha, the main issues with htmx are the poor accessibility of the examples in the docs [2]. In particular seeing so much ARIA without the corresponding keyboard support.
Thanks for chiming in! Do you think it’s desirable for it to stay "ugly" then if it’s for "internal use"?
I can understand the admin isn’t meant to have a "consumer" UI but it still feels like there are lots of user experience & accessibility improvements needed to bring it in line with modern standards (WCAG for example).
I see three quotes from past contributors in the article, that seems like valuable knowledge to me? Anecdotally as someone who contributes to the Django admin I see the interest is there. I’d say it being clunky is for other reasons (for example there being more back-end developers contributing to the project than other skillsets).
Sorry I’m not sure I understand your question? I wasn’t on the internet before web 2.0, by modals I mean things like custom-styled <dialog> element[1] and the `dialog` ARIA role, which I would say are a more recent pattern than pop-up windows. "Modern" might not be the best term here, I should have just said more "usable" perhaps.
Text contrast is actually one of the most common issues with the Django admin. Just on the screenshot in the article, the white text against the light blue breadcrumb and nav headers background is too low contrast as per WCAG 2.0 calculations.
I’d say because you can lose context more easily when having to move to a separate browser tab / window to complete a task? And I suspect the multi-window paradigm is also harder to navigate for keyboard / screen reader users (as opposed to an in-page modal which correctly captures the keyboard focus while open).
Yep, the different button styles for no clear reasons is one. This is even more apparent on other views. On that screenshot, you can also spot questionable alignment between e.g. checkboxes and the title text in the table. Contrast issues with text against different background colors. And I’d also question whether UPPER CASE TEXT is necessary.
It is certainly simple but I’d disagree it’s functional _enough_, because of the numerous basic accessibility issues with the fundamental UI components.
On extending the admin – perhaps there’s something to be said about the admin coming with more UI components built-in? For example it lacks any dialog / modal window implementation, or an "accordion" / disclosure pattern. Or things like support for keyboard shortcuts.