Flatmate Rooms - Rooms to rent, Flatshare, House Share & Flats to let

UK site that lets people find a place to rent or find a roommate (flatmate as they are called in the UK). Rewritten from our own PHP framework using Django with just 1 developer.

Django allowed us to scale to 100s of thousands of adverts and users looking for rooms or flatmates.

Speed comes almost out of the box, there are things that Django could have built-in, such as abstraction for common denormalisation tasks e.g.: count fields with regular consistency checks.

We came to drop admin and auth apps very quickly and built our own admin (just 200kloc of views, some model forms and about 2 dozens of templates). Django docs could put less emphasis on reuse of the auth app as it is not for everyone.

Forms framework could be easier to customise for complex forms and special widgets. XHTML it generates is no longer modern. However it's a real shortcut in almost every scenario saving hundreds of lines of code compared to what we used to have in PHP.

Overall I am very happy to use Django after spending so much researching web frameworks and building prototypes with frameworks from Kohana and Rails all the way to web.py.

The range of python libraries with batteries included is very convenient, just import and use. PIL, Crypto and LXML are a must have.

That's us, Flatmate Rooms: Rooms to rent, house shares & flats in London, Edinburgh, Manchester and all over the UK.

Tags: ajax, business, community-building, company, django, estate, flatmates, flatshare, geodjango, houseshare, network, python, real, real-estate, rent, rooms, social, travel

Visit this website at http://www.flatmaterooms.co.uk/

Created by flatmate on 6th Feb 2012