What’s your favorite Django app?

It is definitely part of the workflow. I don't see how having it separate makes it any less of a part of your workflow. Git is also a part of my workflow. No harm in having it be separate.

The advantage to keeping it separate is it allows South to release on it's own faster schedule. It gets features much quicker than the base framework.

I imagine it will get rolled in some day, when the feature set stabilizes a bit.

Agreed. This is one nice thing about rails, the migrations are part of the framework.

If I recall correctly, South is to be split into two parts (migrations and something else?) and half of it will be integrated into trunk.

You're confusing apps that you never have to write again with awesome apps that really define and make Django better as a whole. Nearly every common use case you can think of exists already has a Django app. Most of them are trivial, but it's nice to not have to write it again. Why would I pick commenting as my favorite app?

South on the other hand, is a major improvement that I can't see myself not having on a daily basis, and it's not a trivial use case that I could knock out in an afternoon. It's well-written, brings a lot to the framework, and solves a problem that most people can't handle themselves. THAT'S a piece of code deserving to be my favorite app.

I suggest you look at http://djangopackages.com/ if you still (incorrectly) believe that Django apps as a whole haven't exceeded every expectation of what sets Django apart from every other mainstream framework out right now. Reusable apps that take the mundane out of web development have been a huge success, even more so with the upcoming class-based views in 1.3.

Isn't that pretty much exactly what is delivered? Here's the comments app for example:

http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/contrib/comments/

For tagging you have a choice between django-tagit and django-tagging. Mingus for example took this to an extreme. Everything was a reusable app. Here's a good article from the developer about it:

http://djangoadvent.com/1.2/everything-i-hate-about-mingus/

http://github.com/montylounge/django-mingus/

The one part of the reusable apps that tends not to get reused are the templates. I find the models, middleware, admin tools, etc… to be a pretty nice way to structure an app.

Moreover, I think it's pretty easy to get caught in a very horizontally structured application because that's how they usually start. You put all of the models in one directory, all of the views in another, etc… I find Django urges you to think about how to slice your application into vertical chunks early on which benefits development.

This is a symptom of the fact that an "app" is a leaky abstraction. It is nice to think about a webapp as being a collection of apps that have well-defined narrow functionality, but it is just not the case. As soon as you start writing code you realize that the apps need to be coupled or you have to jump through major hoops to decouple them properly. Once they are fully decoupled, they look more like plugins than apps.

They are trying to fix this with class based views etc... I hope it works becauseif not they risk losing their userbase to a better framework

Some of the apps do just that, integrate nicely, don't get in the way of the rest of your project, and do their job.

But many apps need all manner of templates, settings, url confs etc to use them. In those cases it's sometimes easier to write something simple yourself.

Schema migration is something I definitely want done right, otherwise production will break. If South didn't exist, I would think long and hard about adding a field, and I'd have to make changes manually in the database, in an error-prone and non-repeatable manner.

In short, you use DjDT more often, but South is by far a much more important part. Which one could you live without, South or DjDT?

I know which one I'd pick...