Moving from 1.8 to 1.11 shouldn't require any changes provided that you're running with 0 deprecation warnings on 1.8. The new release scheme means that if you're running on an LTS with no deprecation warnings, then you should be able to upgrade to the next LTS release with no changes (but lots of new deprecation warnings).
Hope that helps.
https://docs.djangoproject.com/es/1.9/internals/release-proc...
Yes, this is how it's supposed to be. This agrees with Django's roadmap (see the "I’m the maintainer of a reusable application. Which Django versions should I support?" question at the bottom): https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2015/jun/25/roadmap/
However, it depends on the third party apps you're using. I have a Django 1.9 site that uses django-mptt. The site was running warning-clean, but when I attempted to upgrade the site to Django 1.10, it broke because of this issue: https://github.com/django-mptt/django-mptt/issues/469
Moving from 1.9 to 1.10 is different than moving from LTS to LTS. The hope is that 3rd party packages will be testing against LTS releases at the minimum, which should allow you to make the jump after packages have time to update themselves.
This is true. Good point.
LTS is great, if there is some reason that you cannot upgrade when new release comes. But if you use any plugins, just update to the latest version your all plugins support. Some plugins like (or even need) to use internal Django API's and if your app becomes pretty big, you may be tempted to use those internals in some places as well, which makes upgrades more painful due to internal API changes.
Speaking from personal experience of upgrading pretty big and rather legacy app from Django 1.4 to 1.8. Took more than a week.
Always start new projects with the latest version. You don't want to be stuck on really old versions when you eventually upgrade.
If you are just going to write it, and not constantly improve and upgrade it until the next version of LTS, I'd choose the LTS.