Drupal and Framework

Many have concerned on creating a website with a Content Management System (CMS) because it is fast, affordable yet somehow powerful in developing what you need in promoting yourself online.

One is a so many CMS available is Drupal. Drupal is a vast library of software for building highly functional dynamic user-focused websites with excellent content management capabilities. It is the product of an active community of developers whose primary focus is providing a secure, efficient, extensible framework. In addition to providing comprehensive CMS functionality out-of-the-box, Drupal offers thousands of ready-to-use software building blocks that provide an unparalleled range of additional capabilities - all contributed by members of the Drupal developer community.

If you have consider using Drupal as your base. What you need to know is Drupal is a platform between a CMS and a framework. There has been a longstanding debate within the Drupal Community as to whether the framework should be separated from the CMS application. This session therefore serves to provide newbies and experts alike with a general overview of the sometimes contentious debate. Both sides of the debate will be presented, with an emphasis on explaining why framework adherents continue to push for better separation between the framework and CMS application.

Many developers traditionally work with PHP frameworks such as Zend or Cake PHP, and even venture into Ruby on Rails for certain applications. While Drupal started out as a community driven CMS it has slowly evolved to become a mature framework ideal for large scale site development.

With its extensive compatibility with LAMP, mature API libraries, jQuery compatibility and full selection of modules, Drupal is rapidly approaching the core functionality of a framework. Driven by growth in its libraries and customizable backend, the CMS provides content management on top of a maturing PHP structure that makes application development more rapid (the core goal of a framework.) While Drupal has a way to go to compete with Zend, it’s most recent deployments are moving in the right direction.

While Drupal was originally designed as a user friendly community based CMS, it retains the user experience (UX) features while also building out more extensive libraries and API compatibility. Looking at the evolution of the “core” Drupal installation suggests the software is rapidly maturing into a broad framework with modules, hooks and libraries that serve the dual purpose of framework and application development. While Zend and Cake PHP continue to mature, Drupal is becoming more flexible, robust and impressive with each minor release. When it comes to evaluating development relative to frameworks, Drupal offers even more efficiency for rapid application deployment.

Earlier version of Drupal may not have been sufficiently developed out of the box with limited libraries, but today the core of the software provides an impressive basis for development. While major PHP frameworks remain more flexible in their core, Drupal’s latest release allows you to connect with popular libraries through contributed modules. While Drupal is a CMS and application driven framework, it delivers impressive value.

Another major advantage of Drupal is its developer-driven community. As larger organizations build out sites on the platform, the requirements for more mature libraries and capabilities expand even further. While users cannot possibly keep up with each new release of the major frameworks, the deployment cycle for the CMS has been increasing each year and backward compatibility all the way back to version 5 remains strong. With recent movements to incorporate a more concrete administrative backend into modern frameworks, Drupal is coming at the approach from the opposite angle: Drupal adds a framework layer on top of a CMS.