In my previous post I explained that I wanted to explore new non-php web development frameworks like Rails and Django. So I decided to build a blog engine with each of them and see which framework felt the best. I also decided that if I am going to embark on a relatively time consuming learning project, that I wanted to expand my scope and experiment with Twitter Bootstrap and MongoDB as well.

I have used Python several times in the past, and have never touched Ruby outside of a Hello World rails tutorial. I also have some peers that hate rails (even though they like Ruby), so I decided to start on the Python side of the fence. After some research and discussion with peers I decided to start with Pyramid rather than Django.

Pyramid seems to provide more flexibility when break ingaway from the convention, and considering I wanted to use Mongo instead of SQL this felt like a great place to start. After completing this exercise I found that I really enjoyed working with Pyramid(and Mongo), so much so that I pushed my code to my VPS and went public with my blog. This also delayed my Django and Rails trails as I had to prepare to deploy a production version of my Pyramid site. I will start the Rails version soon, but for now here are the steps I took to create the Pyramid version.

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For years I have been hearing about the death of PHP, and I have ignored it. I bought a Rails cookbook a few years ago, but never even opened it. Now, as I write more code in other languages, I see how PHP enables my bad habits. My code get's uglier and uglier as a script ages. I have used MVC frameworks with PHP like Code Ignitor and Zend and they do force better habits, but I really hate singletons. I also just want to learn something new. So I can't ignore it anymore, people and startups are moving away from PHP and are using newer, sexier frameworks.

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