Trust me, go with PHP. Django is good to use if you are interested in learning a new language an improving your skills in python, but if you are interested in starting a company, then absolutely go with PHP. I've used Django for 2 big projects now, and I'm telling you this from experience. Here is why:
1. Django is quite difficult to learn. You'll waste a month or two getting into the framework
2. You will NOT find developers to work on Django, and the ones you do will be VERY expensive
3. Once you know Django well, you'll find that there is not that much of a faster development cycle than PHP, unless you are doing something newspaper related. For newspaper related sites, there are shortcuts, but for everything else, it's pretty much the same routine
4. Hosting for django is expensive. On a $10 a month host, a PHP site will run fast. For Django you need to get a $100 virtual server. Big difference.
5. Django does very little PR, so the language seems to be cooling off in terms of visibility. This means - less applications, less snippets, few books. It's becoming a bit of an elitist culture, which sucks big time
6. The IRC channel is becoming like the C++ channel. Snobby and condenscating.
Recently, a person I know decided to rewrite his entire Django app in Rails because he could not find any developer for his Django app.
1. Django is NOT difficult to learn, in fact I found it very intuitive and easy.
2. This is definitely improving - more and more django developers all the time.
3. Django may have started at a newspaper, but there is nothing newspaper specific about the framework design. Sure there may be middleware modules with newspaper related functionality - but you don't need to install them!
4. WRONG! webfaction.com has great service and easy django hosting for under $10.00 and Django installs with one click!
5. How many books do you need to figure it out? I have a dozen Django books - most of them really good. But I still get most of my Django information online.
6. Well, is it really true or just a reflection?
It's not a hard choice - if you like working with great tools and a great language go with Python/Django; If you hire someone else to do it for you go with whatever makes sense for hiring and the economics of software development.
1. Django is quite difficult to learn. You'll waste a month or two getting into the framework
2. You will NOT find developers to work on Django, and the ones you do will be VERY expensive
3. Once you know Django well, you'll find that there is not that much of a faster development cycle than PHP, unless you are doing something newspaper related. For newspaper related sites, there are shortcuts, but for everything else, it's pretty much the same routine
4. Hosting for django is expensive. On a $10 a month host, a PHP site will run fast. For Django you need to get a $100 virtual server. Big difference.
5. Django does very little PR, so the language seems to be cooling off in terms of visibility. This means - less applications, less snippets, few books. It's becoming a bit of an elitist culture, which sucks big time
6. The IRC channel is becoming like the C++ channel. Snobby and condenscating.
Recently, a person I know decided to rewrite his entire Django app in Rails because he could not find any developer for his Django app.
It's not a hard choice. Go with PHP.