We wanted QGIS server backend and GeoSAFE to run on a stable version of GeoNode. At the time of starting this project phase, GeoNode 2.8 had just been released.
In the previous phase of this World Bank project, we had pushed all our QGIS-server backend contributions upstream to 2.6 / 2.7.
However, we could not get everything to work on GeoNode 2.8 and no bug-fix releases were planned, so we made improvements to our own fork, which we hope to push upstream to get into a subsequently-planned 2.8 bugfix release and also into 2.9 / 2.10.
To compare our fork to upstream see https://github.com/GeoNode/geonode/compare/master...kartoza:2.8.x-qgis_server