I think someone is reading my mail, or should I say mind. For the past several days I had been drafting a preliminary patch and rationale for proposing that the manage.py system be opened up to allow extensibility of custom commands. My initial motivation for this functionality was due to my Newforms Generator. I wanted to be able to inject this behavior into manage.py without having to submit a patch and get buy-in. Well thankfully it looks like someone else had the same exact idea. With Changeset 5925 we get this functionality.
Coming from Ruby / Rails world I have really missed Rake and the simple extensibility of that tool to automate common tasks. Now with extensibility in manage.py I can do a lot of the same things I was accustomed to previously.
The docs online are not updated yet to reflect this change but the Changeset patch has all the information you need to get started.
Very cool stuff.
