I’m a fan of Django and recently Odopod had the opportunity to pitch a site redesign for which Django is extremely well suited. It was not the only appropriate choice, but for several reasons we thought it was the best.

We had some concern that the name recognition of Django is not as strong as the other options that we were presenting as well as those that our competition might present. It would be a shame for a decision like this to be compromised by a popularity contest, so we wanted a list of well known sites and companies that have had success developing projects with Django.

I went through this exercise about 18 months ago and found a fairly long list of news sites, a handful of startups, and few recognizable brands. 

After searching again, I was pleasantly surprised with what I came up with. The list is still weighted toward news publishers, but there is more diversity than before. There more types of organizations represented and the news sites are using Django for much more than publishing stories.

In the end, the client was much more interested in the capabilities of Django and how they would serve him well (a great sign for the project), but the list is a good one and I wanted to share it for others to see and add to.

Sites and Companies using Django

• DonQ Rum (http://donq.com). This is a recent Odopod project built using Django.
• Globo (http://www.globo.com/). This Brazilian television network’s site is heavily trafficked; it is ranked 103 currently at Alexa.com.
• The Guardian UK ( http://mps-expenses.guardian.co.uk/)  The Guardian uses Django for special projects (http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/06/four-crowdsourcing-lessons-from-the-guardians-spectacular-expenses-scandal-experiment/).
• The Los Angeles Times (http://projects.latimes.com/index/tag/django/ ) The LA Times has used Django for many special projects. 
• National Geographic (http://events.nationalgeographic.com/, http://glimpse.org/). These two special projects were developed for National Geographic by Lincoln Loop and Siteworx .
• The New York Times - (http://projects.nytimes.com/represent/). NYTmes uses Django for special projects (http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/22/represent/)
• The Onion and The Onion's AV Club (http://www.theonion.com/, http://www.avclub.com/) - After successful development of the AV Club using Django, The Onion’s main site was rebuilt using Django. http://www.reddit.com/r/django/comments/bhvhz/the_onion_uses_django_and_why_it_matters_to_us/
• PBS – Many sites in the PBS family utilize Django. www.slideshare.net/nowells/djangocon-09-presentation-pluggable-applications
• The Washington Post (http://projects.washingtonpost.com/fallen/ and http://projects.washingtonpost.com/congress/). The Washington Post uses Django for special projects. 
• The Washington Times (http://www.washingtontimes.com). Not only do they use Django, the development team at the Washington Times is quite involved in the Django community (http://opensource.washingtontimes.com/).

I also found mention of these groups using Django, but could not find details regarding the extent of use. If you know more, please point me in the right direction in the comments below.

• Discovery Channel
• Nasa

Django on the Rise

It seems to me that use of Django is on the rise. I see it in the growing list of projects to point to and in the increase of Django related conversations among my online and offline friends.

For many of the projects we work on at Odopod, the Django framework provides the right balance of core publishing features and robust extensibility. I’m not surprised that others are finding the same.

What do you think, is Django on the rise? Let me know in the comments below.