33 projects that make developing django apps awesome

There are many reasons why I like developing web applications with Python and Django but the main one is the awesome community and projects around the language and framework. Every time I search for something there’s always a Django or Python project available to make my life easier.

Here’s an incomplete list of Python and django related projects that I have used or I’m planning to test. This might help someone starting out to get an idea of how awesome is to work with this technologies.

NOTE: This blog post was published on 2011, things in Django land have changed a lot since then.

Django Debug Toolbar
https://github.com/dcramer/django-debug-toolbar
The Django Debug Toolbar is a configurable set of panels that display various debug information about the current request/response and when clicked, display more details about the panel’s content.

South
http://south.aeracode.org
South brings migrations to Django applications. Its main objectives are to provide a simple, stable and database-independent migration layer to prevent all the hassle schema changes over time bring to your Django applications.

Django Paypal
https://github.com/johnboxall/django-paypal
Django PayPal is a pluggable application that implements with PayPal Payments Standard and Payments Pro.

Django Avatar
https://github.com/ericflo/django-avatar
A reusable django application for handling Avatars.

Fabulous
https://github.com/gcollazo/Fabulous
Shameless plug. I made this. It deploys django apps to Amazon EC2 with ONE command.

Django Exceptional
https://github.com/zacharyvoase/django-exceptional
A Django client for Exceptional (www.getexceptional.com)

Django Easy Maps
https://bitbucket.org/kmike/django-easy-maps
This app makes it easy to display a map for given address in django templates. No API keys, manual geocoding, html/js copy-pasting or django model changes is needed.

Django Extensions
https://github.com/django-extensions/django-extensions
It provides a plethora of useful manage.py commands, and a couple other little goodies as well.

Pinax
https://github.com/pinax/pinax
Django-based platform for rapidly developing websites

Django CMS
https://github.com/divio/django-cms
A Django application for managing hierarchical pages of content, possibly in multiple languages and/or on multiple sites.

Django Sentry
https://github.com/dcramer/django-sentry
Sentry provides you with a generic interface to view and interact with your error logs. By default, it will catch any exception thrown by Django and store it in a database.

Django Haystack
https://github.com/toastdriven/django-haystack
Haystack provides modular search for Django. It features a unified, familiar API that allows you to plug in different search backends (such as Solr, Whoosh, Xapian, etc.) without having to modify your code.

Django Celery
https://github.com/ask/django-celery
Provides Celery integration for Django; Using the Django ORM and cache backend for storing results, autodiscovery of task modules for applications listed in INSTALLED_APPS, and more.

Piston
https://bitbucket.org/jespern/django-piston
Piston is a relatively small Django application that lets you create application programming interfaces (API) for your sites.

Django-tastypie
https://github.com/toastdriven/django-tastypie
Creating delicious APIs for Django apps since 2010.

django-social-auth 
https://github.com/omab/django-social-auth
Django social authentication made simple.

Django Social Registration
https://github.com/flashingpumpkin/django-socialregistration
Django Social Registration enables developers to add alternative registration methods based on third party sites. Supported methods currently are: OpenID, OAuth, Facebook Connect.

Django Basic Apps
https://github.com/nathanborror/django-basic-apps
Simple prebuilt applications for Django projects.

django-uni-form
https://github.com/pydanny/django-uni-form
Django forms are easily rendered as tables, paragraphs, and unordered lists. However, elegantly rendered div based forms is something you have to do by hand. The purpose of this application is to provide a simple tag and/or filter that lets you quickly render forms in a div format.

django-filter
https://github.com/alex/django-filter
Django-filter is a reusable Django application for allowing users to filter queryset dynamically.

django-taggit
https://github.com/alex/django-taggit
Simple tagging for django

django-mingus
https://github.com/montylounge/django-mingus
A Django blog engine leveraging reusable apps for all its features.

django-devserver
https://github.com/dcramer/django-devserver
A drop in replacement for Django’s built-in runserver command. Features include: An extendable interface for handling things such as real-time logging. Integration with the werkzeug interactive debugger. An improved runserver allowing you to process requests simultaneously.

FeinCMS
https://github.com/matthiask/feincms
FeinCMS is an extremely stupid content management system. It knows nothing about content — just enough to create an admin interface for your own page content types. It lets you reorder page content blocks using a drag-drop interface, and you can add as many content blocks to a region (f.e. the sidebar, the main content region or something else which I haven’t thought of yet). It provides helper functions, which provide ordered lists of page content blocks. That’s all.

django-schedule
https://github.com/thauber/django-schedule
A calendaring/scheduling application, featuring: one-time and recurring events, calendar exceptions (occurrences changed or cancelled), occurrences accessible through Event API and Period API, relations of events to generic objects, ready to use, nice user interface, view day, week, month, three months and year and project sample which can be launched immediately and reused in your project.

django-revision
https://github.com/etianen/django-reversion
An extension to the Django web framework that provides comprehensive version control facilities.

django-mailer
https://github.com/jtauber/django-mailer
A reusable Django app for queuing the sending of email

django-notification
https://github.com/jtauber/django-notification
Many sites need to notify users when certain events have occurred and to allow
configurable options as to how those notifications are to be received. The project aims to provide a Django app for this sort of functionality. This
includes: submission of notification messages by other apps, notification messages on signing in, notification messages via email (configurable by user) and notification messages via feed.

django-pagination
https://github.com/ericflo/django-pagination
A set of utilities for creating robust pagination tools throughout a django application.

Other not django specific projects that help me with web development

Flask
http://flask.pocoo.org/
Flask is a microframework for Python based on Werkzeug, Jinja 2 and good intentions.

Supervisor
http://supervisord.org/
Supervisor is a client/server system that allows its users to monitor and control a number of processes on UNIX-like operating systems.

Gunicorn
http://gunicorn.org/
Gunicorn ‘Green Unicorn’ is a Python WSGI HTTP Server for UNIX. It’s a pre-fork worker model ported from Ruby’s Unicorn project.

Fabric
http://docs.fabfile.org/en/1.1.1/index.html
Fabric is a Python (2.5 or higher) library and command-line tool for streamlining the use of SSH for application deployment or systems administration tasks.