I switched mostly because of the large collection of apps (= plugins, in other framework terminology) available for Django. The admin app gets most of the attention, but it's way more than that. For example, there's an app for built-in CSRF protecion. There's one for a comment system on any type of object, and another one for threaded comments. Generic tagging and voting apps. Instantly generated RSS (yeah, I know Pylons has this too, but it's built into the framework and not a 3rd-party add-on) or Sitemaps. There's an OpenID plugin. A way to automatically generate robots.txt files. A couple different forums, and a blog. (This is huge: in past projects, one of my biggest frustrations has been getting 3rd-party forums to interoperate with the site's custom authentication scheme. Django lets you use one user model for all components.)
Some other things I liked about it: I thought that Django views were conceptually cleaner than Pylons controllers, with fewer global variables needed. I thought the templating language looked cleaner than Mako as well, though less powerful. The admin app saves me lots of time for mundane tasks that I'd probably just forgo otherwise. I could get used to the ORM - don't particularly like it, but as ORMs go, it's quite nice. I really like that it comes with authentication, sessions & user models built-in. I liked that it was well-documented.
Some things I thought Pylons did better: I think Pylons packaging & deployment is much more mature, built on setuptools, Paste, and eggs. I like that I don't have to use an ORM, and that it's loosely coupled in general. I like how Mako lets me define template functions directly in the template.
Also, Guido blessed Django as "the" Python web framework at SciPy 2006. So far, the rest of the world has basically ignored that pronouncement, and I haven't really heard anything further about it. But I thought that it was generally more prudent to be on the same wavelength as the BDFL.
http://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/DjangoResources#Djangoapp...
Some other things I liked about it: I thought that Django views were conceptually cleaner than Pylons controllers, with fewer global variables needed. I thought the templating language looked cleaner than Mako as well, though less powerful. The admin app saves me lots of time for mundane tasks that I'd probably just forgo otherwise. I could get used to the ORM - don't particularly like it, but as ORMs go, it's quite nice. I really like that it comes with authentication, sessions & user models built-in. I liked that it was well-documented.
Some things I thought Pylons did better: I think Pylons packaging & deployment is much more mature, built on setuptools, Paste, and eggs. I like that I don't have to use an ORM, and that it's loosely coupled in general. I like how Mako lets me define template functions directly in the template.
Also, Guido blessed Django as "the" Python web framework at SciPy 2006. So far, the rest of the world has basically ignored that pronouncement, and I haven't really heard anything further about it. But I thought that it was generally more prudent to be on the same wavelength as the BDFL.