why is that HN crowd is so much into Django? Every day I see something Django-related on the top page. I feel like I'm left out... is Django like the world's number one web framework (for hackers)?
Django is the leading Python framework (by any usage measure) for web development. Python is a popular language. Ergo . . .
As someone who has been learning Django/Python for 4 months, I very much appreciate both the getting started with Django site and the book 2 Scoops of Django that just came out. Would have saved me weeks of time if I had access to these 4 months ago. It's coincidence that they came out within a few days of each other (and a few days after Django 1.5 release candidate came out).
There's even greater interest in Ruby on Rails, the leading web development framework for Ruby.
Because of the love for Python in general. I used Django to fairly good success last year and I'm glad to see it's still going strong. It's far from he Drupal where everything is a CMS option. It's more of a developer-centric CMS system with some sugar on top. Check it out if you are interested in learning. It's a fairly simple platform. The headaches, in my experience, comes from the documentation. It lags behind and the community moves quickly.
Django is a pretty decent web framework for Python (Python being a language that's loved very much by a large majority of folks here).
Pinterest, Disqus, Instagram, PBS site, Washington Post site, etc. etc. are all Django projects. It's definitely worth learning -- the community is helpful and in large numbers, the framework is quite 'complete' -- there are lots of plugins available, it's fairly secure... and it's a pleasure to work with. :)
Thanks =) I certainly know what Django is (although have no experience with it whatsoever), but was a little surprised as to why it is so popular here, specifically. However, that list of Django projects is impressive enough, I guess.
Django has a massive ecosystem where most of the hard work has been done for you. Some people argue it's too much and you should use something like Flask or Web.py but you're going to end up reinventing stuff that's already been solved.
As someone who has been learning Django/Python for 4 months, I very much appreciate both the getting started with Django site and the book 2 Scoops of Django that just came out. Would have saved me weeks of time if I had access to these 4 months ago. It's coincidence that they came out within a few days of each other (and a few days after Django 1.5 release candidate came out).
There's even greater interest in Ruby on Rails, the leading web development framework for Ruby.