Our package maintainers were productive in 2025 (but finding all their names was a bit hard)
How simple thank yous are not always simple to achieve in Open Source
As the holiday season approaches, and many of us start reflecting on what to be grateful for this year, I decided that it would be a good exercise to look back on all the work that went into our package ecosystem this year and take a look at the data from a big picture point of view, so that we could compile a list of names, look at some trends, and thank everyone who contributed this year.
Turns out this was not the simple exercise I thought it would be. So here's a recap of the journey I went through to obtain the lists at the bottom of this page.
Collecting release data from PyPI
I know for a fact that quite a few of our newsletter readers skip straight down to our packages list every time they open the newest issue. No, we're not spying on you. Many readers are just refreshingly honest and tell me these things to my face. Honestly, I'm just glad to hear that people find that packages list so useful.
Whenever I put that list of links together for the newsletter, I create it using the PyPI BigQuery public metadata dataset and a modified version of this query that Thibaud wrote ages ago. We're rather fortunate in the Python community to have a resource like this available to us. Not every package maintainer includes their package on PyPI, but the vast majority of them do. So that data is a great way to keep track of releases and to find out who is contributing to the wider Wagtail package ecosystem.
That query only collects the most recent release of each package though, so I updated the query to collect every release since 1 January 2025. That worked great, but one thing I noticed was that for a lot of projects, the author field was blank. I thought, surely there must be a better field in the metadata for this. Found one called "Maintainer" in the dataset. I ran a couple queries with that field and found out that field was even less likely to be filled out and was often only filled out if the current maintainer is different than the original author.
The odd thing is that each PyPI page has a list of maintainers on it, and for some reason that list of maintainers on the page and the maintainer data in the metadata don't line up. For example, if you look at the wagtailcodeblock project, Tim Allen is listed as the author, but the maintainers list has him and Kalob Taulien listed. When I queried the maintainer field for that project, neither of them were listed.
Most community organizers live in fear of forgetting to thank somebody. Since the author data was incomplete, I had to try and find more data with a different approach so I could say I made a truly honest effort to collect as many names and usernames as I could.
Scraping maintainer names from PyPI
My new AI friend Claude has become useful for creating quick web-scraping scripts. Working with Claude, I created this script that collects the maintainer usernames from each URL on my list. This approach was not perfect because not every package maintainer fills the maintainers section of their page out. But it definitely added a lot of usernames for people who were not listed in the author data, which I considered a big win.
I was curious how many downloads each of these packages received and I did rewrite the query to incorporate that information as well. That modification made that amount of processing for the query WAY bigger than the amount of processing I get for free via BigQuery, so I had to set that one aside and stick with this query. Perhaps next year, I'll do a better job of tracking that data month to month.
All right, now that you can appreciate how many hoops I had to dance through to get here, let's look at what we learned about Wagtail packages in 2025 and who we all have to buy beverages for in the Wagtail community.
Our package maintainers had a productive 2025
Please keep in mind the stats I'm about to go over here may not capture every single package out there. Also, I focused on packages that are specific to Wagtail, even though there many Django packages we love as well.
Outside of the core project and as of when I queried the PyPI dataset, Wagtail package maintainers have created 714 new package releases so far this year! Of those releases, 283 or 40% were version 0 releases, 333 or 47% were version 1 releases, and the remaining 98 or 13% were releases that were version 2 or higher.
The packages with the highest version numbers include CjkCMS, which is on version 25.11.2, wagtail-geo-widget, which is on version 9.1.0, and wagtail-videos, which is on release 7.1.0.
All the awesome people and organizations we need to thank for their work in 2025
All right! Here is my imperfect list of everyone who has contributed to the Wagtail package ecosystem so far this year. We'll start with the names from the Author data first:
- Adin Hodovic
- Andreas Bernacca
- Andy Babic
- Andy Lulham
- Bertrand Bordage
- Bill Fleming
- CodeRed LLC
- Coen van der Kamp
- Dani Hodovic
- David Burke
- Dominik Geldmacher
- Emil P
- Emily Horsman
- Emily Topp-Mugglestone
- Erick Otenyo
- Fabio Marras
- Felipe Villegas
- Fröjd
- Hactar
- Harris Lapiroff
- InfoPortugal S.A.
- Jake Howard
- Jochen Wersdörfer
- Joe Maina
- John Higgins
- Jonas Donhauser
- jonny5532
- Karl Hobley
- Kevin Howbrook
- Lab Digital
- Lukkien BV
- Marc Tudurí
- Marco Westerhof
- Mark Steadman
- Martin Sandström
- Matthew Westcott
- Michael van Tellingen
- Mikhail Robinson
- Nathanaël Jourdane
- Neon Jungle
- Patrick Smith
- Rob Moorman
- ravigupta-art
- Renan Campos
- Rich Ross
- Samir Shah
- Seb
- The Interaction Consortium
- thelab
- Tim Kamanin
- Tom Dyson
- Torchbox
- Vince Salvino
- Webu
- Yousef Abu Shanab
Now, here are all the usernames I scraped from PyPI. These will include the usernames of people and organizations listed above too, but I don't see any problem thanking package maintainers twice.
- ababic
- adinhodovic
- alexandre.silva27
- alexm
- blurrah
- cfpb
- chosak
- cjk
- cliss21
- codered
- csalom
- dan.braghis
- danihodovic
- DiogoMarques29
- donhauser
- DylannCORDEL
- ephes
- FlipperPA
- frojd
- gp
- Hamadr
- iamsteadman
- infofactory
- emilytm
- jazzband
- jonny5532
- kaedroho
- kalobtaulien
- kbayliss
- khowbrook
- labdigital
- Lukkien
- marctc
- marteinn
- marts
- mattwestcott
- mdecooman
- mikedingjan
- mvt
- nickmoreton
- nnist
- otenyo
- r.moorman
- ravigupta
- RiwsPy
- rui.martins
- sablewalnut
- SamuelWeber
- Sebastvin
- sebb
- stuartaccent
- TechBill
- TheOrangeOne
- thibaudcolas
- tim_heap
- tomusher
- torchbox
- w.vanlee
- waldo90
- Webu
- welovemicro
- willbarton
THANK YOU to everyone on this list for the time you gave to the Wagtail package ecosystem this year. I know a lot of you are the sort who tend to scurry away any time a spotlight is put on you, but you all certainly deserve recognition for your effort. Wagtail would not be nearly as amazing as it is without you.
As I showed you in this post, this list was not the easiest thing to make and there are almost a certainly a few names that did not make it on here. If you contributed a package release in 2025 and I missed you, please send me a Slack DM or email us at [email protected]. Gratitude is definitely something I would like us to keep improving and iterating on for our community, even it involves some web-scraping side quests.
