Open Source Update: Waffle

I just pushed version 0.11 of Waffle, the feature flipper for Django. It contains a number of code and documentation fixes which you can also see in the changelog and the milestone.

I had to shuffle the milestones around a bit, though I haven’t yet updated the roadmap yet. Basically, to get the fixes that were already in master, but because there are breaking changes, master became 0.11, and everything else moves down one. Unfinished fixes in 0.10.2 are now in 0.11.1 (and potentially a few other issues). Finished things in 0.10.2 are in the new 0.11. The old 0.11 is now 0.12, 0.12 is now 0.13, etc.

The biggest change is how Waffle supports Jinja templates. Instead of relying specifically on jingo, Waffle now ships with a Jinja extension, that can be used by jingo, django-jinja, or—theoretically—any other library for using Jinja with Django.

Changing Jinja support was the only thing we had to do to get the tests running—and passing!—on Django 1.8, so that’s (finally) supported. Thanks a ton to Ricky for writing a lot of the multiple-Django-version testing code, and WillKG as always for help and feedback on all of those changes.

Waffle Needs Help

It’s easy to pretend Waffle is in a great place when a new version has just come out, but it’s not true. Will has stepped up and been helping out—for which I’m unspeakably grateful—but Waffle in particular could use another set of hands and eyes.

Ideally, I’d love to find one or two people who

1. rely on Waffle in production,
2. on up-to-date versions of Django (1.7, 1.8), and
3. have time to both write some new code but, mostly, help wrangle pull requests.

There are a bunch of open PRs and issues that need triage, and possibly updates and merges. There are also a bunch of open issues that don’t have PRs yet, especially in 0.11.1, which really need to be addressed.

Waffle has a fairly healthy community. Probably the least healthy bit right now is its leadership. I hope there’s someone in it eager to step up and help us fix that. If you are, email me: me@jamessocol.com.