The Pinax Project, a premiere up and coming platform for rapidly developing Django sites, now lives on GitHub at http://github.com/pinax/pinax.

img http://img.skitch.com/20090331-tt68mja4fbn9yy3hsh59kye4c1.png http://pinaxproject.com

Cloud27 is an example of what can be done with Pinax.

The features overview is very impressive:

• openid support
• email verification
• password management
• site announcements
• a notification framework
• user-to-user messaging
• friend invitation (both internal and external to the site)
• a basic twitter clone
• oembed support
• gravatar support
• interest groups (called tribes)
• projects with basic task and issue management
• threaded discussions
• wikis with multiple markup support
• blogging
• bookmarks
• tagging
• contact import (from vCard, Google or Yahoo)
• photo management

Having personally coded almost half of those features for GitHub (and other sites in the past), I’d say this is a huge potential time saver worth a look.