I worked on a similar project about a year ago, and I ended up on having the migrations on the backend only. The frontend was read only, the backend handled everything else.

Edit: I actually read your post and figured your setting wasn't that similar to mine after all. Either way, in the end it doesn't really matter. Do whatever that makes most sense.

Hey, sorry I forgot to follow up on this post lol.

Well, the main issue is the fact that both the API and the Frontend / Portal need access to the same models, but could be on two different servers. The migrations can stay on one or the other, as there will be one central DB server. This leaves me with the only two things I've been able to come up with (so far, I hadn't had a time to really sit down and dedicated a significant amount of time to figuring it out, beyond just in passing thought.)

1. Manually (or setup a script) to copy the models from the API system to the Frontend system on change, such as on my development system before they go into versioning. I really don't like this.

2. Setup the frontend system to completely use the backend system to do all of it's tasks (basically, make an API for all of it's functions and offload that to the API as well via ajax.)

I'm thinking I might do the second one though, typing it up it actually makes the most sense now.

Anyway, thanks for the response!