[Kilimanjaro]

Exactly, that's my point. Not meant to demerit your great work.

The admin/crud stuff, moderation panel, account management, etc, that's what django was developed for. Great choice.

If you ask me to start Disqus from scratch again, I'd probably use django too, for the admin part, but for the API I'd go commando, closer to the metal, without framework at all. No need to load a 100MB routing/modeling/templating monster just to perform an invisible API call.

Highly optimized plain python scripts would work better.

Sometimes frameworks are more like handcuffs. Just sometimes.

[zeeg]

We have never ever used the Django admin, and I would choose Django any day of the week for a project that is web on the web and using a database.

(In fact almost every single project I've ever built has used Django, and there's never been a limiting factor of that choice)

[wahnfrieden]

It's pretty easy to implement yourself but Django's middleware helps a lot too even with APIs.