What are the best benefits of using Pinax?

Pinax is a collection of Django-Apps that have already been glued together for you with some code and sample templates.

It's not plug&play, because Django is not a CMS and Apps are not plugins, but you can get your site going really fast. You just have to remove the stuff you don't need, add other Django Apps that you'd like to use from around the web and write the stuff that nobody has written before and that makes your site special.

I worked on a site with Pinax and had to remove quite a lot, to make it more simple, but it was still totally worth it.

It's a great example (probably the best) of how Django Apps are reusable and how to make them work together best.

Concrete example, here you go:Pinax comes with all the "User" Part of an online community: login, registration, OpenID, E-Mail-Confirmation. That's an example of what you don't have to write.

I'm about to start using Pinax, and I'm glad I discovered it.

Our todo list for the site has a lot of things on it, such as new user sign-up with email verification, discussions, and a news feed for users that blends site-wide updates and updates for that user. We can code all of this up, but it'll take a while. It'd daunting.

Luckily, I discovered Pinax. Instead of coding all those features I'll only need to learn the Pinax structure and write some glue. I bet it will take 1/50th of the time that would have been required to write the features we need.

As the two other posts said, it comes with a lot of pre-packaged apps that take care of common tasks in modern websites. Here's a list of the external apps that come packaged: https://github.com/pinax/pinax/blob/master/requirements/pinax.txt

It also gives you project templates to start from, which you can see here: https://github.com/pinax/pinax/tree/master/pinax/projects/

The projects have working default settings in place so that you can run syncdb then runserver to get going immediately, unlike default Django. Its design also encourages you to write your own apps in such a way that they are more reusable. As they put it, "By integrating numerous reusable Django apps to take care of the things that many sites have in common, it lets you focus on what makes your site different."

It does have a small learning curve of its own but I've personally been very happy with it and learned a lot more about Django (and git and virtualenv) by using Pinax.