Django or CodeIgniter for Turn-Key Web Application

Deployment is clearly a problem for all non-PHP based web apps, but I think things are getting better with the DreamHost/Engineyard type ISP's who provide Ruby/Python etc. out of the box. It also looks like there's going to be a lot of discussion at PyCon this week about ways to fix deployment problems. The growth in popularity of Django, Turbogears, and Pylons is driving demand for better deployment solutions.

That said, if your target market are people hosting on the very low end $12 a year type ISP's then I don't think you have much choice other than PHP.

Finally, one thing I disagree with you is running PHP and Django on the same server. I'm running a few PHP apps on my server with Apache and dozens of Django sites with mod_wsgi in daemon mode. Running it that way means the Python interpreter doesn't use up ram in the Apache workers and vice versa, the PHP interpreter isn't contaminating my mod_wsgi daemons :)

If you want your application to be mainstream then your almost forced to go with PHP. Going from Django to PHP is alot easier than going from PHP to Django. You know the standards, you just need to learn the PHP syntax and functions.

I would definitely use a PHP framework. Symfony and akelos are very similar to Rails (close to Django). On the other than theres Code Igniter which does what it should - organise your code.

Based on your own conclusions, I would go with CodeIgniter. It seems like there would be a ton of work helping your customers install your web app, and I assume you don't want that.

Build a simple-to-install web app so that you can concentrate your efforts on making it better and selling it, instead of working extra as a sysadmin or writing extensive installation tutorials.

(With that said, FogBugz wasn't easy to install on our Linux server, even though it is written in PHP. It took me and my colleague (both programmers!) more than a full work day to install. So I think there will always be problems with installation of self-hosted web apps.)