And Django was far from the only Python web framework at the time Ruby on Rails became popular. Django gained popularity largely because it was seen as a Python

And Django was far from the only Python web framework at the time Ruby on Rails became popular. Django gained popularity largely because it was seen as a Python equivalent to Rails. Before then Zope (on which the popular Plone CMS was built) was probably the most widely used web framework in Python. But there were many, many others too.