I set up my Django project to use MySQL, so that I could use a list in a JSONField. Little did I know that accessing elements of that list by their index would be another problem entirely. There are two confounding things. First, in Jinja2, you can access a for-loop index with the loop.index or loop.index0 keywords, but in a Django project, you need to use forloop.counter or forloop.counter0`. The trailing zero on those keywords specify a zero-indexed counter rather than a one-indexed counter. The second thing is that you need to provide a custom template tag in order to cleanly access elements in a JSONField list by their index.