We wanted to post earlier why we like/use Django, but, we get pretty busy around here, so a bit late. Sorry if this is duping any existing threads.

Why

This is not a Drupal vs Django fight, we're not here to slag Drupal, Drupal has been important to The Onion, but The Onion decided to stop using Drupal a long time ago. The Onion deployed a Drupal site back in 2005, at the time it was the right decision given the resources, yet even then we were interested in using Python whenever possible. We feel it is a vastly better designed language than PHP and of course any framework you're using is only as good as the language. We started rolling out other projects, like The A.V. Club, in Django. Just this past weekend we switched over The Onion proper, and we're seeing immediate gains in speed, maintainability, and stability. As a team we have a pretty broad base of experience and I know we're all in agreement that what we've got now is better, enormously better. We're not just using Django, we have some other pieces that made our lives easier: git, PostgreSQL, VPS's. So this isn't just about The Onion using Django (and recommending it), but generally that you can make things better by investing time and energy into new technology.

How

It took us about 3 months to convert our old Onion site to Django while we also maintained and built on our other sites. We already had some components written for A.V. Club, including a strong article and image model, so we felt we could concentrate on coming up with good models that covered the necessary editorial cases. The hard part was more how to fit pieces of content from ten years ago consistently and cleanly than it was writing the code to make use of the final model. We broke out templates into nicely reusable components and made use of the Django template hierarchy. Multi-db made the conversion of data from a MySQL db to the PostgreSQL db fairly easy, so we could rerun importing old data into the new system and fix and tweak. There is an enormous advantage using Django, sorl and PIL for creating image crops based on templatetags which gives the editorial and design folk flexibility they need (no more css cropping odd-sized images into place). Again, lots of work went into actually cleaning a site that goes back to 1996, Django allowing for a relatively minimal amount of coding -- particularly when it comes to the admin side for content entry, Django trunk we found almost ready to go as-is (something we did not find with previous Django). That we could use the Django admin rather than create custom entry forms I think saved us 2 months work.

Because

Cleaner. Much cleaner. Proper unit testing. Real reusable components across applications. An ORM rather than a just a series of functional query helpers. Tighter conventions (q: how often do people using Python argue about bracing styles? a: they don't). We can update then test a Django core change without worrying about having to take apart our applications, and if we do need to make a change, it's easy to do because there's less, much more readable code. Every member of the tech team can meaningfully contribute because there are fewer specialized or hacked together pieces. We can move more quickly on large changes because of all these reasons. And we're more stable because of all the previously expressed points.

-- The Onion Tech Team