Content on this page is probably outdated and represents my personal knowledge, feelings and understading of things at that time.
I’m very disappointed by the sad state of Django libraries/modules, however do you want to call them.
For example, let’s look at django-mptt. It’s an essential piece in many projects, it works great ( when you patch it, and bring it up to date ) but the project is barely managed. The latest released version is almost 2 years old, there’re over 65 issues. I can understand that both of the leaders ( insin and brosner ) are very busy developers, and they don’t have time to update and manage a “small” project like django-mptt, but I think that projects like that made the difference for django community at large. My first programming teacher said to me, that the best language is not the one with nicest syntax, good performance, good tools, but the one with good libraries. I really hope, brosner and insin will once commit some time to this project, or at least give the steering wheel to someone else. It’s sad to see a project dying like that.
And if you’re thinking “it’s open source, fork it” - I have done it already. I needed openid functionality, and I forked then badly maintained django-openid to my own project django-openid-consumer. The project never got many users, but it just works the way I want. And I hope I helped someone, at least I learned a lot.
It’s really sad to see good projects die because of lack of interest and time. At least some other projects, like django-tagging are getting at least some love.
And then we come to another interesting effect I see in django community. “Hidden” and unpropagated projects. For example, I’m cooperating with kiberpipa.org people on “our” intranet project. It’s django based, quite advanced and frankly quite buggy, but nevertheless interesting piece of software. Released under BSD, but probably noone outside kiberpipa heard about it. What a shame.