MuckRock’s software is written in Python on top of the Django platform. As part of our normal maintenance, we’re doing a major upgrade from Python 2 and Django 1.11 to Python 3 and Django 2.2. We’re hoping the changes will have a minimal impact on day-to-day usage.

For previous site improvements, check out all of MuckRock’s release notes, and if you’d like updates emailed to you — along with ways to help contribute to the site’s development yourself — subscribe to our developer newsletter here.

Ensuring a stable and secure future for MuckRock

Platform upgrades aren’t the most exciting releases, but keeping MuckRock’s technical debt low means that we’re able to continue supporting the platform for the long haul. It also means that we’ll be able to continue to install critical security updates as needed.

While we’re not bundling a whole lot of new functionality in this release, we might have missed some unexpected bugs during our testing period. If you run into them, please just let us know. We’ll be keeping a close eye on things.

We’re also tentatively planning to switch over our customer support software from Zoho to Zendesk. Things might look a little different, though everything should continue to function the same. If you have a Zoho-branded email address saved as the support contact address for MuckRock, please instead just use info@muckrock.com.

Thank you for your continued support and we’re looking forward to some more forward-facing feature releases soon!

Image via Wikimedia Commons