A framework is born

This, of course, meant lots of work for Simon, Adrian, and later Jacob Kaplan Moss who had joined their team; with very short deadlines, sometimes with only a few hours' notice. Since it was the early days of web development in Python, they had to write web applications mostly from scratch. So, to save precious time, they gradually refactored out the common modules and tools into something called The CMS.

Eventually, the content management parts were spun off into a separate project called the Ellington CMS, which went on to become a successful commercial CMS product. The rest of The CMS was a neat underlying framework that was general enough to be used to build web applications of any kind.

By July 2005, this web development framework was released as Django (pronounced Jang-Oh) under an open source Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) license. It was named after the legendary jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt. And the rest, as they say, is history.