I have come to hate PHP now, it's pseudo-OOP is awful, it's dog slow at
handling XML, it's so easy to use that most of the programmers I've had
contact with are very sloppy and do ...

Dude! You should have waited, prices on the PS3 will be dropping by $100 in a few weeks.

I stay with the symlinks, because I tend to use a lot of dumpdata's and loaddata's, and setting env vars for apache or changing the settings file for mod_python does not affect the command line. It's a pretty simple approach. Keep a master settings file, and make a default symlink to it, so nothing breaks. For other environments, create env_settings.py and import the master file. Then change the symlink to point to the env file. :)

I took things yet a step further and made it so that an data in an apps '/media/' directory was automatically served up, and could have its location overridden in the server settings file. To round things out the template tag looks like: {% load appmedia %} {% app_media_prefix "myapp" %} The source code is here: https://svn.python.org/conference/django/trunk/ https://svn.python.org/conference/django/trunk/pycon/templatetags/appmedia.py https://svn.python.org/conference/django/trunk/pycon/urls.py Project information: http://us.pycon.org/TX2007/PyConTech If you want to get really really fancy, there is a context processor which safely brings in all of django.conf.settings in a lazy way (and disallows access to sensitive information). It still needs some work, but it allows for packaging up the media in the apps so they can be moved to different sites easier.

Very well thought out. I like ideas that when I hear them I think "Damn! Why didn't I think of that!"

I use the ENV vars as well for a large chunk of the settings.py file. I find it's cleaner to have a single settings.py file. It keeps things unified when the environment dictates your settings file. Moving from production/dev/test setups require different user accounts but not different settings.py files. I find it removes an element of human error and causes no surprises when you release new software or add new developers. My 2cents