Django and Zope/Plone
I have spent a lot of time with Django here of late. Some of them in a highly frustrated state. The difference, I believe, between Django and Zope/Plone (other than the obvious difference in purpose between the two) is that Plone gives you a lot out-of-the-box and in my experience, things work as you expect them to. Not entirely so with Django. Much of that is my ignorance with a new system, some of that is the immaturity of the project’s exposure to the general public where the issues are quickly discovered and some of that is use of voodoo by way of metaclasses used heavily in Django. On this latter point, I’m not sure how you would create such a framework without them.
Having said that, the real difference, for me anyway, is that you can actually grok through the code and using pdb and other technique, you can figure out where you are and where your going. Certainly you can do this with Plone; however, once you get there you can’t be convinced you know where the hell you are.
Django has a small footprint and a focused purpose. I am finding that refreshing. I am by no means as productive with it yet versus Zope, but I can see that I am getting there. One other surprise I found was how much I really don’t like ZPT. I can’t exactly articulate the reasons for this. Maybe it is just change of pace but once I began utilizing Django’s templating system I felt in some sense freed. I also like its limitations regarding python: calls in ZPT.
