I've been using Pyramid for some projects lately, and I'm finding I like it. However, in thinking about making re-usable apps for it, like Django, I can't come up with an approach that would be generally liked by Pyramid developers.
Django is at an advantage here because it makes a bunch of choices, mainly with the ORM. Pyramid, though, makes it a point to not choose a persistence method. This, in turn, makes it tough to implement a re-usable app in a flexible way. I do know of a way...using Zope interfaces.
That's right, I said the Z word. Interfaces have fallen out of favor in Python programming, but they would help in this situation. A Pyramid app could provide interfaces and a method of looking up a particular implementation (using the Zope Component Architecture, or repoze.lemonade), but that also means implementing the storage a few times - the two main mechanisms I know of being the ZODB or SQLAlchemy, but there could be Mongo or other NoSQL mappings too.
I suppose implementations could be split out into their own packages, but that seems overly complex.