GeoDjango or just plain Django?
One way is with straight django and raw sql. But it will look ugly. If you spend the time going through the pain of getting GeoDjango up and running you'll find it well worth the effort, as performing queries such as "find all locations within 5 miles" become very easy to implement.
I am working on a project that involves a spatial model, just 2 coordinates points with latitude and longitude - no areas, boundaries, lines etc. Can I get away just by using plain django or should I use GeoDjango? Do I need GeoDjango to do spatial queries (find all locations within 5 miles etc.)? Also, should I consider using MongoDB for the data storage? The other models should be fairly standard: users, relationships, events... basically pretty structured things that would fit nicely in a standard DB?