Yeah, I definitely understand your reasons for doing so — I’ve been a big fan of Jeff Croft and company’s work with LJWorld and the Ellington CMS and all that. I think I’d like Django, from the limited amount I’ve read and the little bit of experience I’ve had with Python… I was actually going to use it for a project in one of my classes this semester, but I wouldn’t be able to use it on the hosting platform that I’m supposed to be developing on — just ASP or PHP.

Looks cool though… good luck with deployment!

- Ted

Two reasons I really really wanted to use Django on this dare of a project:

1) It’s historically a very news-centered framework. The framework itself was created by Adrian Holovaty, who ironically was also the Maneater’s online editor nearly a decade ago. So maybe I feel a little more connected to it, heh. It’s being used by a few journalistic projects, most interestingly some computer-aided reporting (CAR) ones like EveryBlock (the successor to ChicagoCrime). I figure, if I’m working my way toward a Web journalism career, I’ll use what they use.

2) I needed an excuse to learn — really, thoroughly learn — a new language. I thought about Ruby/Rails, but decided Python’s somewhat more commonly deployed than Ruby and a bit more mature.

There are some things about Django that apparently other frameworks handle better, particularly handling external input and creating user interfaces that aren’t the admin panel. I’ve become too accustomed to creating my own in Prototype/Scriptaculous, and that kind of defeats the purpose of a framework’s streamlining capabilities.

Have you looked at all at Symfony (www.symfony-project.org)? It’s a MVC-based PHP framework heavily inspired on Rails. I haven’t had a chance to learn Rails yet (or Django for that matter… Ruby and Python are my next projects, but work keeps me busy on PHP projects), but it works, and works well. If you’ve ever used CodeIgniter or any of the other ‘lightweight’ PHP frameworks, symfony is far better.

From what you say about Django, it looks fairly similar, with the automated CRUD backend and such… also has a sweet ORM layer that I’ve played around with a bit (but most of the projects we’ve just used our own database abstraction layers).

If you ever get frustrated with Django any more, might be something worth checking out. :)

P.S. You know anybody (or yourself) who would be interested in starting a small design agency? I’ve been looking for people to do some collaboration on projects with, but most of the people here are either socially inept or can’t code/design their way out of a cardboard box. Facebook me if you are interested or know of anybody.

- Ted