[This is an excert from the Django Book, http://www.djangobook.com]

Django is deeply rooted in the problems and solutions of the Real World. It wasn’t created to be marketed and sold to developers, nor was it created as an academic exercise in somebody’s spare time. It was built from Day One to solve daily problems for an industry-leading Web-development team.
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It started in fall 2003, at — wait for it — a small-town newspaper in Lawrence, Kansas.

For one reason or another, The Lawrence Journal-World newspaper managed to attract a talented bunch of Web designers and developers in the early 2000s. The newspaper’s Web operation, World Online, quickly turned into one of the most innovative newspaper Web operations in the world. Its three main sites, LJWorld.com (news), Lawrence.com (entertainment/music) and KUsports.com (college sports), began winning award after award in the online-journalism industry. Its innovations were many, including:
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* The most in-depth local entertainment site in the world, Lawrence.com, which merges databases of local events, bands, restaurants, drink specials, downloadable songs and traditional-format news stories.
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* A summer section of LJWorld.com that treated local Little League players like they were the New York Yankees — giving each team and league its own page, hooking into weather data to display forecasts for games, providing 360-degree panoramas of every playing field in the vicinity and alerting parents via cell-phone text messages when games were cancelled.
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* Cell-phone game alerts for University of Kansas basketball and football games, which let fans get notified of scores and key stats during games, and a second system that used artificial-intelligence algorithms to let fans send plain-English text messages to the system to query the database (“how many points does giddens have” or “pts giddens”).
* A deep database of all the college football and basketball stats you’d ever want, including a way to compare any two or more players or teams in the NCAA.
* Giving out blogs to community members and featuring community writing prominently — back before blogs were trendy.
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Journalism pundits worldwide pointed to World Online as an example of the future of journalism. The New York Times did a front-page business-section story on the company; National Public Radio did a two-day series on it. World Online’s head editor, Rob Curley, spoke nearly weekly at journalism conferences across the globe, showcasing World Online’s innovative ideas and site features. In a bleak, old-fashioned industry resistant to change, World Online was a rare exception.
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Much of World Online’s success was due to the technology behind its sites, and the philosophy that computer programmers are just as important in creating quality 21st Century journalism as are journalists themselves.

This is why Django was developed: World Online’s developers needed a framework for developing complex database-driven Web sites painlessly, easily and on journalism deadlines.

In fall 2003, World Online’s two developers, Adrian Holovaty and Simon Willison, set about creating this framework. They decided to use Python, a language with which they’d recently fallen in love. After exploring (and being disappointed by) the available Python Web-programming libraries, they began creating Django.
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Two years later, in summer 2005, after having developed Django to a point where it was efficiently powering most of World Online’s sites, the World Online team, which now included Jacob Kaplan-Moss, decided it’d be a good idea to open-source the framework. That way, they could give back to the open-source community, get free improvements from outside developers, and generate some buzz for their commercial Django-powered content-management system, Ellington (http://www.ellingtoncms.com/). Django was open-sourced in July 2005 and quickly became popular.