PBS chose Django after seeing a presentation by Jacob Kaplan-Moss and Adrian Holovaty at OSCON 2006. That Fall, PBS Education began work on a new version of the PBS TeacherLine website. The site most users see when they visit PBS TeacherLine is essentially a brochure and catalog that allows educators to purchase seats in online professional development courses. However, behind the scenes is an administrative infrastructure that allows over 50 PBS stations and PBS national staff members to administrate hundreds of course sections and over ten thousand learners every year. There are robust features for accounting, reporting, student and staff management just to name a few.

The TeacherLine website was initially written using Django 0.96. The site is currently running Django 1.2 and has had major upgrades made to some of the core systems including the implementation of a robust message queue solution to handle the most intense administrative functions. Over the past four years, the PBS Education Technology Team has learned many lessons about system design, best practices, handling upgrades, and creating Django-based code that is flexible and easy to maintain.

In this discussion we will look at some of the more interesting points in the history of PBS TeacherLine, including design patterns, workarounds that were eventually made obsolete by improvements in the Django framework, and the process of iteratively improving functionality and features. We will discuss successes and failures, including the pitfalls we avoided and (perhaps more interestingly) those we did not.