The concept of "deployment"

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Django can host multiple applications on the same site, where apps work like lego blocks - parts of the whole, for example - an online store and an askbot forum, etc.

All django sites have four project-wide files:

• settings.py - the main settings configuration file
• urls.py - main url configuration
• __init__.py - often empty but needed for Python
• manage.py - the hook allowing to run management commands

So what startforum script does - adds those files to a directory you select (and some more things specific to askbot.

If the directory is empty - the files will be just copied from askbot/setup_templates/, it won't overwrite any existing project files.

In the case you already have a django site you will not want to use startforum, because you don't want to just overwrite your existing settings.py.