Pinax and Lego
I met up with James Tauber yesterday morning. We had lots to talk about, one subject being how you explain Pinax to developers. We had a lot of fun creating an analogy with Lego (best toy ever invented IMHO).
Lego bricks and your imagination are all you need to build interesting toys. In our analogy, Django is Lego bricks: it gives you the building blocks you need to build interesting things on the web.
Yet rather than building from scratch each time you want to create a toy you can buy off-the-shelf Lego sets for the most common types: cars, trucks, space-ships, movie themed locations, towns and so on…
Pinax is a collection of Lego sets: it gives you a set of off-the-shelf components commonly used in web-development: a wiki, OpenID, Twitter clone and so on…
What's more, Lego sets are themed and interchangeable and if you really want to do something "out there" you can break them all down to the brick level and re-use only what you need. Pinax's applications are "themed" (social networking, CMS, messaging etc), interchangeable and, should you want to do something extremely bespoke, they're open-source so you can re-use only what you need.
Voila, now even my four year old son can understand what I'm up to! :-)