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DjangoCon Europe 2016: Call for Sponsors

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88 pointstweakz13 comments

I want to say this carefully and respectfully, not least because I believe in the guidelines here on HN.

But, my last experience (2011) with Django was not encouraging. It's not that it doesn't do what it says on the tin, I believe that it does. It's that it's just so darn complex to work with. Installation was very, very difficult. And, once built, it felt like there were a number of layers of 'magic' between me and getting something done.

I know there are tradeoffs in content management systems; I launched and sold two companies based on content management tools, the later one based on the ArsDigita Community System in 1998, and so I would say I have at least 10 years of CMS experience in a variety of different environments and languages.

I have a bias against magic, and maybe magic is what's needed for most CMSes. But I still have a little shudder when I think about dealing with install and configuration, backup and datamodel changes in a very small site.

Can anyone offer a counterpoint? I'd like to be able to change my mind if it should be changed.

Hello! I have been writing Django for more than 3 years now and I think I qualify to give a counterpoint. First, I would agree that Django's documentation could be more beginner friendly. But you know providing excellent cutting edge tool and providing excellent documentation is a very difficult task and it does require some more love.

Django as a framework is very different form traditional CMSes like wordpress, Drupal etc. It is mostly meant to write scalable web services with great speed and has batteries included for example a good ORM, migration assistant, good admin etc.

If CMS is your usecase, you should have tried Django CMS(it is built on top of Django and support great features. (http://www.django-cms.org/en/)

I think you need to understand that every framework or library in the world requires you to read the documentation. There is not shortcut.

However, Django CMS also comes up with a very nice installer(http://docs.django-cms.org/en/develop/introduction/install.h...). It automates almost everything. Whenever you change your model, you generate migrations and run it. python manage.py makemigrations python manage.py migrate

I think coming from other framework/language, just be a little patient and give it another try. If you still feel any issues, feel free to jump in the IRC (#django, #django-cms) and ask your questions. The community is nice and kind enough and you will probably never hit a roadblock.

Clearly the community is a huge asset! This is some of the politest advocacy I've seen in an Open Source project. Thank you!

Sorry to hear you've had trouble in the past! Things have definitely gotten easier/clearer in terms of docs, defaults, and setup guides from 5 years ago. Especially considering Django recently turned 10 years old, your experience is fairly out of date. I'd encourage you to give modern Django (v1.8+) a try.

Also one thing I'd like to point out, that is a frequent source of confusion, is that Django isn't a CMS. It's a general purpose web framework, akin to Rails or Express. It just happens to have come from CMS roots and is particularly adept at "content" type systems.

Disclaimer: I'm pretty biased about Django :)

Thanks! I did use CMS loosely or just incorrectly, as others have pointed out. My recollection is that most of the tutorials at the time were baked around typical CMS scenarios. But, I hear you. It's always good to have something you love! :)

There is certainly some involvement of magic - read: metaclasses[1]. However, I just want to add another anecdotal data point. A few month back we had a four hour Django session with interested teenagers. Most of them had no problem picking up Django based on a prepared tutorial. Even though other frameworks might be more lean and slim, Django has still a lot to go for it in terms of comprehensiveness and ease of start.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/q/100003/89391

That's a very good anecdote, and definitely a better datapoint than my own experience. Anything that's giving young coders an entry point is a good one. We can hope they don't run into metaclass difficulties in their early days. :)

On most platforms getting Django to run is as simple as:

  > pip install django
  > django-admin startproject myproject
  > cd myproject
  > python manage.py runserver

1.4 (2012) made it a lot easier to get started with Django.

Also Django isn't a CMS, if you're expecting it to be like Wordpress, Drupal, etc; it is not going to fill your need (although you might want to try Django-CMS)

Hope I'm not just adding noise at this point, but I want to also chime in in Django's favor here.

Firstly, the situation today really is very different than 2011, although I will say that I also used Django around then and also enjoyed it.

The documentation in particular is actually, in my opinion, some of the best documentation of a project out there.

That said, this really depends on your use case. I think Django is a great fit for some things, especially building up REST APIs or fairly complex dynamic applications, but there are some usecases for which it's not as suited.

I'm not sure which platform Django would be difficult to install on. I used it on App Engine at around the same time as your experience and found it simple, flexible and expressive. I wouldn't use it for a very small site as a CMS - WordPress or Jekyll sound more appropriate there.

I did a bare metal install, and I sadly don't recall what was painful about it specifically; I recall fighting with Apache and Nginx and WSGI in some sequence of combinations.

It is definitely designed for a larger deployment. My memory is that it felt very 'heavy weight'.

In terms of fighting with Apache/Nginx/WSGI, I think you'd have similar issues with most other frameworks.

During development, you can run a self-hosted Django instance with `python manage.py runserver`.

Once you've developed your application and are ready to deploy, I'd personally suggest this guide (although others may have different opinions): http://uwsgi-docs.readthedocs.org/en/latest/tutorials/Django.... It boils down to installing uwsgi, creating a wsgi config file (which specifies the path to your Django app, and it's name), and then telling nginx to proxy requests to your wsgi socket.

It might be you're correct in general. The last few years, my team has worked with go fairly extensively for this sort of work, and it is a single line of go and a very short nginx block to get running.

I think the difference was that django wanted python running through WSGI; the go servers expect to be running behind the scenes and just using nginx as a proxy.

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