In plain English, what are Django generic views?

Django generic views are just view functions (regular old python functions) that do things that are very common in web applications.

Depending on the type of app you are building, they can save you from writing a lot of very simple views.

For example, the direct_to_template generic view simply renders a template with the RequestContext (which means the template has access to information on the request, like the current user, etc).

As a simple example, you can go from writing things like this:

# urls.py
url('^some-url/$', some_view)

# views.py
def some_view(request):
    return render_to_response('template_name.html', context_instance=RequestContext(request))

To just this:

# urls.py
url('^some-url/$', direct_to_template, {'template': 'template_name.html'})

# views.py doesn't need any code for this view anymore

There are also more complicated generic views for common actions such as "showing a list of models", or "adding a model to the db".

Also, because generic views are just functions, you can call them within your own view functions to do "most of the work", when you need something that is a bit different from the generic cases.