Love django. Whats the consensus on best way to use django in 2025? I've been going the headless route. Django for the backend and using vite or nextjs on the frontend with openapi specs auto-generated.
It's still the best RDB schema creation/migration tool I know of. It has a crazy number of plugins to handle all sorts of unusual field types and indexing. I usually add django to any project I'm doing that involves an RDB just to handle migrations. As long as you avoid any runtime use of the ORM it's golden.
I've been a fan of Django templates and HTMX. I like how I can get interactivity without too much complexity. I do have specific parts of my website that rely on more complex tools, such as Codemirror. Even then, templates work well enough for me, so I haven't found a compelling enough reason to adopt more JS for my website.
I wanted to like HTMX and Alpine. But after a few medium sized projects with it I went back to vite/react for larger frontend. I found it so difficult to come back to old htmx/alpine code. If you got a complex UI to maintain I would personally recommend the React route. It is very easy to setup with Django.