Web Dev. Framework for RAD Web App Dev. in Shortest Time ( Yii vs. Django )

I googled it and found nothing of much interest , right now me & my Team know/partially know ( Codeigniter, Yii) and also Django (Python Framework) , now after working with codeigniter for past 1 year we have noticed that we are not that efficient and we still have to code most of the stuff( comment system, image upload, rating, voting etc. ) repeatedly ( you can call it progressive enhancement ) .

Now , we have started development in Yii and it's superb we are experiencing it but what I find is that I love Python more than PHP , but due to deadlines and time shortage , I cant ask my team to switch to it now . SO, what I'm trying to do is convince myself that which framework among these 3 ( Codeigniter, Yii, Django ) would give us fastest delivery times ?

My personal opinion is that Yii & Django are somewhat equal but due to avilability of large no. of Packages [Django Packages][1] , we will be able to develop quicker and faster , although Yii has it's extensions too [Yii Extensions][2] but at this time there are not many and only few of them are highly stable , while others have bugs still (Maybe all this is due to my higher knowledge of PHP & PHP frameworks than Python frameworks & Django ) so, I would be glad if someone who has some practical experience transitioning from PHP to Python based frameworks could shed some light on this !

Edit: I'm looking for a practical response from a programmer who has developed in both frameworks Django vs. Yii ( or has atleast played with them ) and he/she can verify that development time for a typical CMS/Portal/Review Website/Digg clone ... type Web App takes less time in one than other , as Time is what I worry about learning the language / features/ benefits are not that important , scalability too ius a matter of proper DB optimization and other architectural changes , also i would like to highlight that I'm not considering Ruby on Rails as I dont want to learn ruby just for a framework , rather I'm interested in Django vs. Yii in terms of shortest time to market given all other factors ( manpower/skill set/DB design) equal , Kindly help , I have been thinking about this for a week now !


[1]:

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[2]:

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Vivek, this is one of those questions to which it's hard to give an answer better than "it depends". Personally, I think that the language and its ecosystem is a very important factor in the choice, perhaps more so than the specific framework.

Why so? As you mentioned, you found out that you had to write a lot of code from scratch even though you thought a framework would provide it. *This is a basic fact of our programming life* - no matter the framework / library, eventually we're going to write some functionality of our own because:

* Either it's missing
* Or it's not good enough for our needs, for 1000s of possible reasons

So in the end, as an application becomes more and more complex, we'll find ourselves implementing more and more functionality because the existing libraries just aren't flexible enough. I think that the recent success of web micro-frameworks in Python has its roots in the same cause.

This is why the basis is important, and the basis in your case is PHP and its ecosystem vs. Python and its ecosystem. Both languages have huge amounts of library code available, but which do you find more pleasant to work with *as a language*? Which is the one you and your co-devs know best? Which is the language for which you'll find it easier to hire new devs (if applicable)?

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P.S. I don't know much about PHP, but for Python/Django, apart from Django Packages, there's also [Pinax][1].


[1]:

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Never used Yii and Code Igniter, but i come from CakePHP and now i work on Django, and i enjoy it. I can say that in Python there's a higher test-culture, and Django has superb docs. If you search for Yii and Django on github, you'll find 191 vs. 6176 projects.

IMHO Python is orders of magnitude better than PHP, and the average Python code is better than the average PHP code.

Your choice should be between Django and Rails or Sinatra, i think. Python community is bigger than Ruby community, instead there are more Rails projects and developers than Django.