Interesting, my fairly large django project uses none of those. Instead, the addons we consider to be critical are these these:<p><pre><code> django-debreach
django-redis
jinja2
pytz
</code></pre>
Redis for queues and caching, debreach to secure the CSRF tokens and vary your content length to avoid the BREACH vulnerability. jinja2 for doing templates outside of returning data, and pytz so you can use timezones in your data models.<p>I also recommend installing `flup` and running via fastcgi, but that's open to interpretation.
Amusingly, my must-have Django packages are mostly things that replace large chunks of Django (Jinja2 for templates, a DB connector/ORM for whatever database the project needs, which even for PostgreSQL is often plain SQLAlchemy).<p>I guess I'll just use flask.py or something for my next project. This is not meant as criticism, just my personal experience.
Django guardian's performance is ridiculously bad. Better roll your own. We're using it and stuck with it at this point, but some of our page loads have thousands of queries because of all the permission lookups. Permissions probably need to be cached in memory.
Cripsy forms, because simple things like adding the necessary markup for bootstrap to forms is super-boring otherwise ; in general, it helps with custom form layout, which is usually a template maintenance hell<p><a href="https://github.com/maraujop/django-crispy-forms" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/maraujop/django-crispy-forms</a>
Everyone recommends the django-toolbar for spotting slowdowns in your SQL... ok, installed it. I almost never see any tips on how to actually do that though. What now?<p>(I suppose the SQL part of my app is not the problem though, rather the number crunching that happens on the data returned. I do lots of caching on the results instead to make the site seem responsive.)
What are people using these days for compiling their static assets (js minification + concatenation, etc)? We have been using django-pipeline but it has been a nightmare.
A few I work with on most projects are...<p>Backend: one of the most popular API Frameworks is Tastypie.
Authentication and authorization: Django Userena.
Debugging: Django Extensions.
Django CMS
Django Haystack<p>These are a must for your tool kit.
"Django REST framework is an insane framework"<p>I'm fed up with this kind of oppressive language. This is heteronormative and is discriminatory to the mentally ill. It's stuff like this that leads to the imbalance and under-representation in the industry. Let's boycott this author.<p>(I would love not to have to write "</satire>" but having seen some of the comments here, I think I need to. I wonder how many white-knights-for-women use language like this without thinking. We need some flexibility in the way people are allowed to express themselves.)