Black Python Devs has a "New" website

So I'm announcing this a little early because it's a hectic time for BPD right now with our upcoming leadership elections.

For the last 3 months, we've been working to migrate our website from Render Engine to Django. While we're still in the process of getting things figured out. We've move the repo from internal to public and the website is available at https://blackpythondevs.org.

Why no longer Render Engine?

Moving from Jekyll to Render Engine was the absolutely correct choice at the time, but our processes have grown. The biggest reason to make this switch is a financial one.

That probably doesn't make sense because hosting our static site costs $0.

We currently use a project manager to handle a lot of different requests that our executors have to manage and maintain. Given the number of of leaders that we have and the pricing, it costs us about $1000/year to use this service.

We switched to this service because it helped us create some workflows that were absolutely fundamental in us operating over the last year. Our unofficial plan for 2027 is to actually INCREASE the amount executors, establish a community partnership program, offer more automated processes, and establish workflows that our community partners and champions can use to share information with our community members and allies.

The original plan was to move these processes into our project manager but realized that could DOUBLE the cost of our project management and not give us the results that we wanted. So we opted to work towards automating our processes as much as possible. So far we've been able to move our elections, our distinguished service award, and council award nominations in.

What does that mean for now

For now mostly nothing. You can go to both Blackpythondevs.org (The django site) or Blackpythondevs.com (the static site) and it should be about the same with the difference that you can create an account on the django site and set notification preferences. We aren't sending out notifications just yet but this will be the primary way we disperse information to community members in 2027.

Help is always appreciated

While I'm a big fan of Django, I don't have the most experience with it when it comes to an application of this size and complexity. While I've been using Claude Code for a lot of this process, I already recognize where optimizations could exist and where trying to move content from one site to another resulted in less than desired results. Feel free to checkout the github repo and file any issues that you may see. We also have about 20-30 issues that are outstanding that I, along with a few others on our tech team are tackling. You are more than welcome to submit a PR.