Django Praise: vs CakePHP

I just wanted to drop a little praise to everyone who has contributed to Django over the years.

I worked on a project about a year ago, and did it exclusively in CakePHP.  I can't go into too many details about what the project is due to privacy concerns, but it revolved around customer self-service booking for events.  This included a very long form that was broken out into several steps.

The customer has asked for quite a few changes as of recently, and the CakePHP app is becoming unmanageable and too time consuming to update.

Over the past few days I took a stab at rewriting it in Django.  It was pretty easy to copy over the templates and adjust them to the syntax that Django expects.  I changed around the models a little, and modifications since then have been incredibly easy thanks to using South.  It makes going from development to production a breeze.

In addition to that, the auto-admin interface has been incredible.  It "just works".  There are a few minor things that have needed tweaking, but it's been fast and easy to do.  When I update a model with a new attribute, they automatically show up (unlike Cake).

Finally, the FormWizard is incredible. I can't even begin to mention how much time I wasted writing my own for this particular project.

I didn't mention all of the external apps I've included, but they have sure made my life a heck of a lot easier.

Thanks again to everyone who has put time and effort into making Django a great framework.   My first project with it has made everything much easier, and I can't praise it enough.

Kris