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What do I need to know to make a basic Django website?

As the title states, I am curious what I need to know to make a website with Django.
My Attempts:
I am familiar with Python, but despite my attempts to begin work on a webpage(attempted some Django tutorials online and purchased "2 Scoops of Django" and started to work with some of its recommendations) I always feel like it points me at something else to learn. (PostgreSQL, git, virtualenv, VirtualBox, Vagrant, and more.) I understand that some of these are tools I just need to implement, but I feel as if I could delve into these much further and don't understand when I should stop trying to learn more about these.
My Goal:
I want to be able to develop a webpage with Django, and understand the steps and tools I am implementing.
My Question:
What tools do I need to learn, and how much about them do I need to learn to be able to begin working effectively with Django?

This is a very broad question but I can try to answer it as clearly as possible.
You said you are familiar with Python, that's a good thing. The next thing you should know is the MVC framework that Django is based on and uses extensively.
You can refer to Django tutorial here: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.9/intro/tutorial01/ (as already mentioned)
I can give you a TLDR of how this can work:
1. Create a django project : $ django-admin startproject mysite
2. In the file structure that is created, the most important things would be:
a. models.py - your database models or schema defined as classes and objects
b. views.py - the view you are trying to display (mainly rendering .html in your case)
c. settings.py - you path, app setting, permissions, etc
d. urls.py - how you will be calling your specific views (redirect urls)
Once you write a basic app, try to run it using $python manage.py runserver and voila!
For the website part, there a few easy ways. You can download twitter bootstrap and try to attempt a simple page that you can find online with django http://getbootstrap.com/2.3.2/
As far as technologies go:
venv: is so that you do not mess up your other python, etc versions on your laptop, it isn't necessary
git: this is something you should learn irrespective of a project requirement. There are basic 3 commands that will be enough.
You might have to learn basics of HTML and CSS for manipulating your own website. Most of the backend can be handled on Django using objects of models you created.
Try these things out and let me know if you need anymore information.

Getting started with Django, Heroku and Amazon

I want to change my static website (http://ingledow.co.uk) to a Django site on Heroku and Amazon using GitHub to store the code.
I've been through the Django tutorial once, so I'm fairly new to the whole thing.
Where would you guys start with this? Any useful books, code learning websites you could recommend to get started?
Thanks
David

To easily understand and visualize Heroku when hosting Django apps I created this drawing for our startup ChattyHive. I hope it is helpful. Don't hesitate on asking me any doubt or suggest anything :)
(please right clic on it and "view picture" to see it full size or it will be too small!)

The best way to learn Python and Django is to be comfortable with creating a proper environment for developing your application, although you can skip the details and start with Heroku's official guide on how to manage a Django application across the whole stack.
At the time of writing, these are some of the essential tools Python developers should be comfortable with:
virtualenv for creating distinct copies of the Python interpreter and it's environment
pip for managing Python dependencies
fabric for defining administrative tasks across all your target environments
puppet or chef for provisioning environments
vagrant for provisioning development environments
I would suggest that you immediately familiarize yourself with vagrant and focus on the virtualenv+pip+fabric trio--these are ubiquitously utilized in any Python web project and your bound to be forced to come to terms with them sooner or later, so get straight to it and you'll be otherwise amazed how you ever managed any Python development without them.
As far as learning Django is concerned, you will need to understand that Django is still just plain-old Python, what WSGI applications are, how domain objects are modeled, how Django routes requests, how views handle requests and how they produce responses, including additional and intermediary framework components. Afterwards, you should be knowledgeable enough to start tackling any requirements you might have of your application.
I will stress that having a good grasp on Python goes a long way in helping you understand how Django was designed and how to better write and organize your application's sources. The documentation is pretty exhaustive and it's the primary resource for any developer, but if you find yourself in need, there are several good books written that focus on providing additional material on certain aspects, but never forget to hone your Python skills.
Worth mentioning is the Django Package index which tracks any Python package specifically written to be integrated with Django. Their repositories are publicly accessible either on Github or Bitbucket and they range from tiny to huge and are an invaluable resource to see how other developers are doing Django development right.

Maybe you should start with some introduction books about Django,like The Django Book.

Where can I download a sample Django template?

I just started working at a place as a front end developer where I need to build Django templates. I never worked with these before, does anyone know where I can download a sample template so I can look through the code structure?
I won't be doing any application development using the Django framework, only taking the variables the developer gives me and incorporating the in the html/css templates I build.

There are lots of Open Source django apps that you could look at for inspiration. One example is Zinnia which is a blogging application - there are dozens of templates in this project, see this directory. There are many other open source django projects on http://github.com and http://bitbucket.org
You should also take a look at the official template documentation, there are lots of snippets there that are very useful.

Here's a nice little tutorial.
http://www.webmonkey.com/2010/02/use_templates_in_django/
Also, Check out the Django Docs.
http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.3/ref/templates/builtins/

Django directory plugin

Is there any Django plugin or reusable app available that we can use to add online directory feature to our Django based website?

You will not find something like that, because using django means you can do that with just a few lines of code by yourself. Django is not a CMS, but a framework, which means you are one level deeper. A lot of the things where you would use a plugin in a CMS are common tasks for django programmers, so there really is no need for a plugin to display such stuff as you mentioned.

What are the various Python CMS's and their statuses?

I'm usually a PHP developer that has lots of experience with Drupal CMS & framework. And I realize Drupal is very mature, but I don't know much about the Python scene.
I've heard the following CMSs be mentioned:
Plone
Django (framework)
What other CMSs are there, and what do you think are some of the pros and cons? How mature are they? Is it even worth starting to use Python for general web development?

My vote is for Django CMS. Django itself is a development framework (but one that gives you a lot for free, including an excellent pluggable admin interface). DjangoCMS is an application that you can install into a Django application. I am using DjangoCMS and, as a Django user, I think it's perfect. I'm not what non-Django users would think. It's no Wordpress.

Here is a page which lists the Python based CMS. Zope based Plone is the very popular one and very mature too. Apart from that you, have customized solutions built using Django, like Django-CMS and also there are wiki like MoinMoin Engines. That page gives a lot of options for you.

Django is not a CMS; it's a web development framework.
That said, Django's roots come from newspaper-oriented CMS-like systems. Unsurprisingly, that makes Django a very good platform on which to create a CMS.
You can check the state of Django-based CMSs on Django-packages, which tracks the project metrics of many packages.