Hi, I've had a rather ambitious project on my mind for as long as I've been at my job (almost a year) -- to pretty much rewrite their central application, which is a listing database/"portal", around and upon which their entire IT infrastructure and web and computing tasks and operations are haphazardly based. What they have is in ASP.NET, and their developer is not even logical and has little to no knowledge of their business model, and this "Sales Portal" is still buggy after two years in development and active use... Not to mention that the company is trying to cut costs all over the place and making more of a mess. Therefore, I am greatly inspired to do it better. It's nothing advanced. I believe Django is the way to go.
Thing is I'm a complete newbie know-nothing when it comes to Python or Django in practice. So I want to learn by embarking on this project, yet I'm unsure of how to start it in terms of structuring; for example, should the listing DB and UI be a Django "project" or Django "app"? It is integrated into their public-facing website, which I would like to expand my Django endeavor to include (they don't even have a CMS, everything's static, we use FTP, it's totally archaic and they think it's fine but it's wildly disorganized of course); but so this is where I get confused as to how I should structure the project ("project"?). It needs to be scalable to multiple sites, which are mostly pretty different from one another. The admin UI I would like ultimately to make like an intranet with roles and permissions. The sites also have outside members on the frontend.
I hope I'm making enough sense here... but so what would be a solid scalable structure for something like this? Where should I start? Rather, I should start with the listings/"Sales Portal", and go from there. But where should that go? Am I just thinking too far ahead..? At the very least, should this Sales Portal be an "app" or a "project"? (I'm leaning towards app.)
I really want to try learning this way because it's a practical application that I know most of the requirements for, and they're diverse enough to give me a broad introduction and help me see how to connect things on different levels. Advice/info of any kind is highly appreciated.