Plain – a web framework for building products with Python

Related, "Django's REST (Framework) Problem" — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43510495

I'm not sure that many people who rely on Django Rest Framework are aware that last month the bug tracker was made private and the project is looking for new maintainers.

I love Django but the project needs to go through something similar to Angular's renaissance (and Angular needs to learn from Django docs.) I'd love to help but it seems that most of the efforts to address the issue have been stalled in committee.

A fork probably isn't the answer but something needs to be done. If it's a money issue, pass the plate! Whenever I talk to Django devs about contributing the feeling that I'm left with is that I could put in years of work, jump through every hoop, and at the end of it they may still say "We're not sure."

The feeling that I've gotten is that the Django dev community is very small and tight-knit. Whenever I've talked about helping out on various projects I've walked away with the feeling that their friend is handling it and they'd rather leave them to it. The community has been trained, through years of reinforcement, to wait instead of getting involved.

I've some mixed feelings about this fork. On the one hand, I get the motivations, there is alway a lot of value in experimenting outside of a legacy project. But at the same time, I cant help but feel uneasy seeing something I've deeply respected and used on for years being split off in this way, "fork of Django" is a big statement.

Part of that discomfort comes from a sense that the collective effort into Django is being sidestepped rather than built upon. It feels like a "saas-fication" effort, like Ruff, Docker, Terraform, etc but instead of going from creating something new it replaces something that already works. I worry about the potential for a more commercial or narrow direction that doesn't embody honestly the open, thoughtful mission thats made Django so special.

I'm in love of boring software.

I care about Django more than I realized. Seeing this has actually pushed me with a gut emotion to want to get more involved contributing code, writing, or just participating more with Django

It's not about the tool or the language, I want to feel different about the community that is open and respectful of contribution and values long term relations.

It's not fun to be boring, but boring is good

As a guy with a lot of hours into Django, I will echo that I don’t quite understand the “why” here.

I think there’s a number of areas where Django falls a bit short and other web frameworks excel. For example, task workers are not first class citizens and require Celery or another task manager. REST APIs are a similar situation. Celery and Django REST are great, but they do feel a little ham handed. I’ve seen other frameworks handle this in ways that really seem to work great.

I guess auth is prioritized here? But I actually like the barebones Django auth and find it useful in many situations where I don’t need full OAuth.

I’m not saying this isn’t needed and it looks cool and nice - but for the use cases where I’ve struggled with Django, it seems like this would actually increase complexity, as the 3rd party ecosystem would obviously not be robust.

It looks like the author has a perfectly good workflow and use case for this, but it’s not clear from the homepage or the “about” page linked elsewhere in the comments exactly what this is for

Seems weird to me. The strength of Django is the ORM and the ecosystem/idioms.

Why would I break compatibility with the latter by taking a fork?

I would love to see better admin (so many have tried to do this) but it’s unclear to me why the goodstuff here can’t be a Django project template. (https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/5.1/releases/1.4/#custom-p...)

As a longtime user if I want anything different these days it’s a lighter-weight experience like Django Ninja or FastAPI.

I have mixed feelings.

I just switched to Django from Supabase/Firebase. The main thing I like is theirs a plugin for everything you’d want.

It’s also much easier to actually self host, Supabase is open source, but actually doesn’t self host all that well. You have a bizarre gap between ’free’ with constant nag emails warning you there about to turn off your project, a 25$ paid tier and a black box enterprise level. Call us isn’t very transparent.

For Plain, I’d much rather this be a Django plugin, I don’t want to replace a well supported and documented framework with a 1 person fork. Definitely looks cool, but you’ll never be able to provide the same ecosystem and support as the main Django project.

I appreciate this effort and am surprised by the negative sentiment. I evaluated the big 3 frameworks (Laravel, Django, and Rails) last year and Django felt like the worst of the lot.

I really wanted to like Django more since I use python at $dayjob, but it seemed so far behind Laravel and Rails terms of DX and features. Also the ecosystem seemed fragmented and a lot of packages looked stale.

For example, I remember having to piece together a static files pipeline for Django with whitenoise, how is that not included by default?

Additionally the issues around the user model are bizarre, near the very end of the docs they tell you to override the user model to fix it. Wat.

Lastly Django templates felt super limiting, Livewire/Laravel and Hotwire/Rails gives you so much out of the box.

I ended up choosing Rails to start building side web apps, their move to SQLite-first and the whole “Solid” suite of tools is rad. Specifically Solid Queue is awesome! I noped out of Django when I saw how intense the docs for setting up celery were.

Hoping this spurs some activity in the Django-sphere, I would love if Django felt more complete like Rails!

I took a peek at the docs https://plainframework.com/docs/ and the packages/functionality mentioned there.

Everything, and I mean everything is already either in core Django or in a great and properly supported django package that's been used in years and has been proven to be reliable.

I really can't understand the purpose of this package. Taking a peek at the about as mentioned by some others:

> You can think of Plain as a "what if?" > What if you didn't have to worry about deprecation policies?

The fact that Django has deprecation policies and they are so religiously followed allows me (and others) to have 10+ years old projects running in Django 5.1 and being ready for 5.2 without any problems or baggage!

> What if there were no committees?

A committee is a good thing. It ensures two things: a. It's not possible to commercialize the project. b. It makes sure that it will do what's best for most users. Some decisions may no be good for a particular user but it would be best for most users (considering my previous comment; I want to keep my 10+ years old project properly supported).

> What if you could change anything without consequence?

See previous comments. You can change anything without consequence when you have a clean slate, not when you need to support current stuff.

> What if Django wasn't originally built for a newspaper circa 2003?

This really doesn't relevant. Django is a general purpose framework.

> What if you had a clean slate, but a proven head start?

See the previous comments.

> working through years of incremental progress and committees, with a very real possibility of some things never happening, is just not for me.

Please see my previous answers. Also, about changing stuff, that's the purpose of packages, ain't it? Django has a lot of escape hatches to change its behavior from the defaults. And of course if you wanted to do something not supported you could try to do a PR so as to open another escape hatch so Django will keep the default behavior but you'll be able to implement your thingie.

Concluding, I really don't like this project forking Django because all this effort could be put to better use and definitely not try to split the community. Especially the community of a real Open Source project like Django.

I feel the About page would be better for the audience who clearly already knows Django: https://plainframework.com/about/

Trying to run the starter kit, it tries to download mkcert, but that download fails with a ssl.SSLCertVerificationError... how ironic :)

brew install mkcert fixes this.

Also, a starter kit that asks for my password right away is a bit too intrusive for me:

    Downloads/new-project [master {origin/master}|]: uv run plain dev
    Generating SSL certificates for app.localhost...
    Created a new local CA 
    Note: the local CA is not installed in the system trust store.
    Note: the local CA is not installed in the Firefox trust store.
    Run "mkcert -install" for certificates to be trusted automatically 

    Created a new certificate valid for the following names 
     - "app.localhost"

    The certificate is at "/Users/me/Downloads/new-project/.plain/dev/certs/app.localhost-cert.pem" and the key at "/Users/me/Downloads/new-project/.plain/dev/certs/app.localhost-key.pem" 

    It will expire on 29 June 2027 

    Adding app.localhost to /etc/hosts file. You may be prompted for your password.

    Password:

I don't know if Plain has a chance to succeed but I understand why it is a fork. Django leadership haven't been able to move Django forward outside of its old paradigms and every attempt, be it a fork or third-party app, counts.

First thing that I don't like is the settings being strings that reference classes. Usually that means that go-to definition does not work (I've seen similar things in Symfony with YAML use). If the config needs to reference a class, or some object, I would like to be able to easily navigate to it as opposed to having to manually search the project for it. If this was an actual object reference as opposed to a string, I could, and I'd also get intellisense for if I typed it right or not, and autocomplete.

Then of course they "solve" it later with a (probably paid) plugin. But why? LSP's support this natively, and for free, just don't use strings.

Tbh why should I use this over Django? Less docs and knowledge around it. Less maintainers. Idk seems like a business risk to invest real time in it for me