I'm a freelance web-developer that specialises in PHP with a background in C, with an extensive experience in Drupal content management system (6 years and counting!) .
This blog is a dumping-ground for research, thoughts and developments.
Email dgtlmoon@gmail.com
The Onion (running drupal 4.7 which may be the reason ;) are moving away from Drupal, as discovered here
http://www.contenthere.net/2010/03/the-onions-migration-from-drupal-to-d... and here http://www.reddit.com/r/django/comments/bhvhz/the_onion_uses_django_and_...
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.
dgtlmoon is an organization member of the Drupal Association, which fosters and supports the Drupal software project, the community and its growth.