Django for web perfectionist with deadline

www.djangoproject.com

According to the official site, “Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.”

What that means to me, as a non-programmer, is that Django is a set of core components that takes care of a lot of the programming work that goes into building web applications and other database-driven websites so I don’t have to. Those things that must be done for nearly every web site are built-in, so I can ignore them and focus on what makes each site unique. Here’s an (incomplete) list of things Django provides out-of-the-box:

* Authentication and authorization (users, groups, and permissions)
* Database connectivity (several supported databases, no SQL needed)
* Administrative interface (for adding/deleting/modifying items in the database)
* URL configuration (for making simple, clean, sexy URLs)
* Internationalization (makes localization easy)
* Feed syndication (RSS/Atom)
* Comments on any type of object (both anonymous comments, which Django calls “free comments” and comments that require registration)
* “Flat pages” (simple HTML content stored in the database and passed into a template)

Now, if you’re used to building sites using a blogging app (Wordpress, TXP, etc.) as a CMS, you’re used to getting all that for free. But you’re also getting a lot of things built-in that maybe you don’t want (unless, of course, you’re building a blog). The limitation I ran across in using a blogging app for my personal site is that I wanted it to be more than just a blog. As soon as I tried to hack a blog into a photo gallery, or a links feed, or a statistics database, a game of Sudoku, or whatever else I could think of, things started to get crufty. I also built a website in which I tried to use a discussion forums app (vBulletin) as a CMS, and that had the same results. It worked — sort of — but it wasn’t extensible, was very hackish, and just generally was inelegant.

With Django, you get all of these things and none of the limitations of a blogging app.