Add links to third-party packages in documentation

[tim-schilling]

Code of Conduct

• I agree to follow Django's Code of Conduct

Feature Description

Add links to popular third-party libraries in the documentation in areas to increase visibility to the third-party ecosystem. The mentions of these libraries should be clear that they are not part of "Django" core and may go out of date.

Problem

There are too many feature ideas to be incorporated into Django core, but we also need to provide people with pathways to find these packages. By defining a pattern in the documentation that links people to a third-party package or resource to find out more about a relevant component or piece of logic, we make the ecosystem more visible.

Request or proposal

proposal

Additional Details

For quite a bit of time, Django has said no to including links to third-party packages. This started changing with the inclusion of the Django Debug Toolbar in the official tutorial. The current steering council is working on a community page that highlights various aspects of the community, as well as third-party packages, that are popular.

If we can write the references to these other packages to be clear that they are additional information, not part of django/django and suspect to change because of the nature of open-source, we may be able to get the risk of stale links to an acceptable level.

Implementation Suggestions

Some initial areas we could get started on:

• Getting started contributing could mention Djangonaut Space as a resource
• Getting started contributing could mention Jazzband and Django Commons to find other projects to work on
• The how to create custom django-admin commands could mention django-extensions
• The reference docs for storages could mention django-storages
• The production deployment and static files docs could mention whitenoise
• Authentication docs could mention django-allauth
• The permissions docs could mention django-guardian
• The settings topics could mention python-dotenv and django-environ
• Sending email could mention django-anymail
• The internationalization and localization could mention django-modeltranslation, django-modeltrans, django-rosetta

[github-actions]

Thank you tim-schilling for sharing your idea! We have a lot of them so please be patient. You can see the current queue here.

Community instructions

For commenters, please use the emoji reactions on the issue to express support, and/or concern easily. Please use the comments to ask questions or contribute knowledge about the idea. It is unhelpful to post comments of "I'd love this" or "What's the state of this?"

Reaction Guide

• 👍 This is something I would use
• 👎 This is something that would cause problems for me or Django
• 😕 I’m indifferent to this
• 🎉 This is an easy win

[LilyAcorn]

I think this is an excellent idea! I think as part of landing this, we should form a team that is responsible for managing third party package sections in the docs. I think a review once per feature release would probably make most sense.

[luzfcb]

Just remembering that https://djangopackages.org ( https://github.com/djangopackages/djangopackages ) exists and maybe it could also be referenced in docs. @jefftriplett is its current maintainer

[jefftriplett]

I'm +1 third-party packages being mentioned and we can do anything with Django Packages to make it easier to list or share packages then feel free to open a discussion or issues. I think we are a little time and scarce atm, but I am hoping we can change that over the next few months.