On the one hand, kudos to a team for taking on a big project and getting it done without interrupting service. But on the other, the article does nothing to explain the why-behind-the-why. Why did this change need to happen? What benefits are they now realizing? What aspects of Django attracted them in the first place? I want the sequel to this post.
You're definitely correct that this post was light on the motivation for Django versus continuing with custom PHP. Perhaps it would be worth a follow-on post, as long as I can figure out how to not turn it in to a framework flamewar :)
In short though, we wanted to realize the obvious benefits of web frameworks over our poorly-constructed prototype raw PHP application (DRY, code re-use, reusable applications, MVC organization, testing tools etc.). We're now seeing basically all of those. Our code is clean and well-constructed because we were able to lean on the wisdom of the Django community. We use fully 24 different reusable Django applications, along with a couple dozen python libraries. Whenever we face a challenge, more often than not we can find a great blog post from the community that addresses a very similar issue and sometimes we can contribute back a little bit. When we hire new people, we can point them to Django's great documentation if they're new to Django, or they can jump straight in to our project and feel at home because it looks like basically every other Django project.
We're very very happy with Django and what it's given us over our own raw PHP. Other frameworks, like RoR would have given most if not all and more of these benefits, but the important thing in my opinion is that if you're doing a web application, you find a web framework that meets your needs. Honestly, when it came down to evaluating frameworks, it was RoR versus Django because that's where the community was. For me, it was Django because I like python's "one obvious way" versus ruby's many ways, which is a purely aesthetic judgement that plenty of people much more qualified than me make in the other direction. Once I realized that both of them would do a great job solving the problems our business was facing, I just made a decision and started writing code :)
