By : shabda

Django is not flexible at all because you can not do simple things like.

• Using various authentication mechanisms.
  You can authenticate via Username, emails, Facebook, Twitter or any combination of these.

• Using different database backends.
  Use MySQL, PostgreSQL, Non-relational databases, more or a combination.

• Use different mail sending strategies.
  Send mail via smtp, queue to database, log to files and more.

• Different file storage method.
  Store locally, FTP, Amazon S3 or write your own.

• Store messages in Sessions, cookies or others.

• Cache things in Files, DB, Memcache or just fake it.

• Save sessions in files, DB, Memcache or cookies.

• Use Jinja, Mako or Gensi as templating library.

One of the most lingering criticisms of Django has been that it is not flexible. People have criticised its design as too-tightly coupled, hard to extend, and inflexible. As a result, people have recommended to roll their own using SQLchemy, Jinja or web.py.

I think this view is unfounded and wrong. You would be hard pressed to get the choices and flexibility which Django offers. Eg, while development I run with Sqlite, Dummy caching, and emails on console, while on production I switch to PostgreSQL, Memcache, and queued emails.

Many apps use this backend pattern themselves. Django registeration, Django-celery and our own merchant.

I have always been annoyed at Django is inflexible meme, and the recent Charles Leifer's post put various Django plug points to make writing this too post easy to not do it.