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Comment by pvnick | Hacker News Reader

I'm currently working with Django for a client's project I'm developing. Coming off a LAMP stack binge, the technology itself has been an absolute delight. I've been given the directive to use South to manage the data model, but for future projects I was hoping somebody with more experience can give some insights as to what you've found works and what doesn't work. I'm not the biggest fan of South, but maybe it's just a lack of experience/patience.

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Unfortunately that's the best we have right now. However, the guy who wrote South (and is a core Django developer) ran a Kickstarter last month to raise funds to write South-like functionality directly into the Django core.

He (Andrew Godwin) also recently gave a talk on the subject, (http://lanyrd.com/2013/djangocon-europe/schgcz/).

any idea when his talk will be published (youtube/pyvideo)?

It's on youtube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCNh2TVQ2o0

ah, missed that, thanks.

The video was already embedded in the Lanyrd page linked to above.

for the curious: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andrewgodwin/schema-migr...

£17,952 pledged of £2,500 goal. So it looks like this should be happening. Stated intention as to when:

> As the intention is to get something into Django core itself, the idea is to land this for either the 1.6 or 1.7 release of Django. The work itself should be mainly completed by July 2013, and ready for alpha testing and feedback at that point for those who want to try a development version of Django.

He has been writing updates on his progress at http://www.aeracode.org/category/django-diaries/ as well, if you are curious.

I would always use South, but you need to read the migrations and _understand_ what it's doing. When it gets a conflict (and it will), you need to be able to fix up the migrations.

South is pretty great for very simplistic migrations. However, it does not issue DDL efficiently. For example, if you're adding two columns to a table, it will issue two separate ALTER TABLE statements. Depending on your database and table size, that can take twice as long as needed. It can really add up when your tables start hitting millions of records.

I saw the template support and was over the moon, so I made this:

http://www.stavros.io/posts/django-template-projects/

It should help people just getting started with Django to have a smoother transition. I will add various templates with "best practices", like South included by default, stuff like that, to help both me and complete newcomers to easily get started with a new project.

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