Hi Scot

> I just wanted to thank everyone for their excellent contributions to
> this thread. Sorry I got side-tracked for a while. I've just put up a
> pretty complete draft of a post on this topic, written with decision
> makers (managers, supervisors) in mind. It's still probably somewhat
> technical for that group, but that's the nature of the topic.

Having held your post in my browser for most of a busy day I finally read it 
but wondered throughout who it was targeted at. Now I come back to this thread 
I still wonder. When you say "managers" and "supervisors" you don't indicate 
their level of technical knowledge or involvement. Your post suggests they ARE 
technically minded and involved and sells your argument from that perspective. 
If however they aren't then I think there is one angle it seems to ignore: If 
we picture that one focus in any managers agenda is "are the things that need 
to get done getting done so I can answer to my higher 
uppers/clients/customers/etc?"

I can of course only speculate here, but I imagine that the appeal of Drupal 
you are trying to compete against is that, from their perspective, in going 
from 0-60, Drupal appears to already be at 50. It really doesn't matter to them 
that it could have taken 4 times as long to get from 0-50 as it would have 
taken if Django was used. To them the tangible is where Drupal is now.

It's also a jump to be able to realise that the 50-60 bit takes even longer and 
may actually never quite get there with a pre-existing solution. Your post 
almost deepens the sense that yeah, Django may be great but it's at 0 and as a 
manager I have to put ALL my trust in you that you're right. Partly because all 
those things Drupal already has I don't have either the time or knowledge, or 
both, to manage the development of anyway.

With that in mind I think you need to start at a more comparable point to 
Drupal. It has loads of solutions already built that actually DO work together 
which you don't mention. Drupal is a CMS so why not refer to existing CMS apps 
or better, let NASA do it for you:

http://pydanny.blogspot.com/2009/11/picking-django-powered-cms.html

There is one point that you made that you should push a lot more, albeit a 
little differently: "In Django, all development starts by defining the data 
models that describe the organization, publication, or site.". That single 
point is huge for an organization; Compared to a pre-existing solution Django 
is used to build something that fits the organization not the other way round.

Where I think you need to reword is that you say "starts by". Does the manager 
really know where the start is? Do they picture a blank page with a blinking 
cursor? Of course they'd be nervous if that is what they see. You and the rest 
of us on this list know of course that Django is itself already very well 
equipped and what it doesn't contain it has an ever increasing list of 3rd 
party solutions that can be used even if temporarily.

I could probably go on but I think I need to let sleep have it's way for a 
change!

Cheers,

Nick


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