Django Project
Over the last couple weeks I’ve been researching a new way to develop websites that would be more flexible for my needs. I’m hoping to develop a website for a small company that I’m helping to start. At first I’d like it to be a simple website with a few static content pages, but in the future I’d like the website to give users an ability to log in, for administrators to have a blog, to publish an RSS feed, and to build a shop. All of these can be done to some extent with WordPress or Drupal, but when I’ve wanted to steer away from the provided tools of those CMS packages I’ve run into a lot of difficulties.
My next solution would be to use a web framework like my past work in PHP. I don’t really like PHP from my experience building a website for my fraternity and so my search was for a more flexible and more mature web programming language. Enter Django.
“Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.” – http://www.djangoproject.org/
I love writing code in Python. Even better, python is a mature language with lots of flexibility that would give me the ability to build any web application I can think of. Django is also a Model-View-Template design, meaning I can add and subtract functionality in the form of applications without worrying that I’ll break my website.
I’ve just started with Django but after completing the surprisingly complete tutorial I was able to build myself a basic Content Management System to serve up static web pages in less than a day. My new CMS even has most of the functionality of the WordPress CMS for pages, despite the fact that it may not look as pretty.
I’m excited to see where this goes with Django. I’ve already lined up the project for my small business startup and I’m hoping to rebuild another website that I finished years ago in PHP. I feel like the possibilities are endless.
