[reuser]

Django has such numeric superiority that there is not a lot of point splitting hairs on whether it is "default." While it isn't in the stdlib and there are other good choices, Django might as well be the default, just as Rails might as well be the default in Ruby.

[tbatterii]

You sure about that? It is my understanding that Zope/Plone has a fairly sizable community. They're just not as loud on the web as other framework fans. No one will know for sure until they are all counted though.

[reuser]

I'm heuristically pretty sure. From my personal experience talking to people, and from some surveys or other I have casually looked at over the years, what is mentioned most in job ads and mailing lists, heuristic stuff like that. The same kind of stuff which leads people to say that Rails is much more popular than other Ruby frameworks.

I would love to see a scientifically exact census but I don't think it can be done. Maybe PyPI could roughly tell the story? But you won't get a real unique-users count unless your logging identifies unique users, who wants that?

Please understand: I am not a big Django promoter, I disagree with many of its design principles, and I don't think that other things are "dead". I know that there are reasonable numbers of people out there using Zope/Plone, Flask, Pyramid, and other things. Just because Django is huge doesn't mean they are nothing or not worth looking at. I believe Rails is significantly bigger than Django, but that doesn't mean I'm switching to Rails.