Ask Hacker News: What Python web framework should I use?

What python web framework would you guys recommend for smaller web projects? Examples would be a small blog engine, simple news site etc. Django seems quite huge for simple projects, so recommendations are more than welcome.

Use Django for any web publishing app - blogs and news sites are its real strength. I'm using Django for what I would consider edge cases (eg building on-line databases) and it's not a perfect fit, although I think it will work.

If you learn Django, I'm sure you won't regret it. I don't think it's "huge" at all: it's compact and usable.

For very small projects (i.e. only a handful of users, no serious performance requirements), I typically use web.py (http://webpy.org). It's very simple and offers only very basic functionality, but does a good job of staying out of the way and generally letting you do whatever you want. I've heard from friends that Pylons is also a good option, but I found it to be more complex than I really needed.

I'm currently working with TurboGears. I evaluated pylons, django and web.py a year ago and made my decision. Here is a summary of my opinions (note from a year ago).

pylons: didn't really like the lack of decorators, didn't seem to be an ORM of choice, docs looked weak although the wiki was well stocked with recipies

django: really well documented. Seemed to be HUGE and I felt intimidated by it. It wasn't clear to me I could strip it down to what I needed. Didn't seem very modular, you can only use the Django ORM and templating engine.

web.py: Far to simple for my needs, you need to build nearly everything from scratch, simple to learn because there is nothing there!

I chose Turbo Gears because it seemed easier to chose the components you want to use. The idea that the TurboGears community picks best of breed python components and integrated them really appealed to me. This is both good and bad but in general I think it's been good for the project.

A year later and I haven't been disappointed. The TG community is really friendly as well :) TG is working with the pylons team for the next version of TurboGears and I know there has been a lot of code sharing between the groups.

That's my 2p, good luck.

I prefer Pylons. I've built all sorts of things with it:

* A RSS-rewriting, caching "proxy" for the News.YC feed

* A search engine for 2 gigs of email, going back to 1995

* A customized CMS-like app

* And now, my blog, which I'm almost done writing; I keep making changes to the architecture.

TurboGears 2, which some have recommended, is being built on top of Pylons.