Many of the problems that affect content-driven websites actually affect all businesses, even traditional brick-and-mortar ones. For instance, consider a restaurant that offers a menu of daily specials or whose menu changes frequently based on the selection of fresh food available in the city or region. To market this menu on the Web requires tools for quickly producing and updating content. We can imagine similar examples in the retail world, where product inventories ebb and flow depending on seasons, styles, and trends.

In the online world, this kind of content production is often taken for granted. The entire business of Amazon.com is built around a large, structured, and highly-detailed database of product information, along with customer ratings and reviews. Netflix's enormous selection of movie rentals would not be possible without an equally large content database.

Django provides an excellent basis to build e-commerce websites in part because of its ability to handle these content problems. Content is one of Django's specialties, having been created to serve the needs of the newspaper industry. It provides many out-of-the-box tools to handle these demands. For example, the built-in admin interface (as shown in the following screenshot) can automatically manage any application's data, in a way that anyone with a web browser can access. The admin tool can be attached to any Django project with a trivial amount of effort and just a few lines of code.

Handling content so effectively is possible because of Django's excellent Object-relational Mapper (ORM). Data-driven approaches to web development have been around for a decade. Originally this involved lots of tedious SQL code, but over a period of time much of this has been abstracted away in libraries or framework code. Django's ORM is arguably one of the best abstractions created thus far and its query interface is often cited as a killer feature. It's even possible to use the ORM portion of Django in standalone mode and take advantage of its expressive power. Django's ORM has even inspired other projects, most notably Google's App Engine project, which borrows features and syntax. We will highlight many features of Django's ORM throughout this book.

There are many other advantages to Django as an e-commerce platform. Rapid development tools, in general, mean cost reductions for initial development and long-term maintenance. Decreasing these costs is another specialty of Django. As an example, in Chapter 2, Setting Up Shop in 30 Minutes, we will create a fully functional web-based store, from scratch, in 30 minutes.

What about competing frameworks? What advantages does Django have over them? A big one is Python. Without stoking religious debate, Python, by its own merits, is an excellent programming language for the Web. Django is built in Python and features many "Pythonic" tactics at the core of its design. The language includes numerous modules that are useful to web developers, including a URL manipulation library, XML parsing tools, and web service tools. The Python community is massive, and provides additional modules and tools. Python developers can frequently avoid reinventing the wheel because either the language or the community already provides what they need.

Django is flexible and able to handle content as well as other e-commerce problems, such as shopping carts, user management, and payment processing. Built-in support for cookie-based user sessions and basic account authentication gives Django developers a major head-start over developers who must implement these from scratch. Submitting orders and processing payments through any of the Web's payment services is also very easy, as we will see in Chapter 4, Building Payment Processors.

All of these factors exhibit a common theme: competitive advantage. Cost savings, code reusability, and flexibility of use all allow businesses to do more with less. E-commerce sites built using Django can be deployed faster and respond quickly to change.

There are a few important criticisms of Django that might affect the decision to use it in your specific projects. First, it's relatively new and has yet to enter the mainstream software community. It's also open source, which unfortunately still prevents its use in some corporate environments, due to concerns over support, maintenance, and security. And finally, it is written in a different language and paradigm than many current mainstream e-commerce products. There are armies of Java developers because many e-commerce applications are built with it. By comparison there are fewer skilled Python developers.