What Is The Difference Between A Cms And A Framework?

12. Dec, 2009 3 Comments

I’ve been reading about Drupal and Joomla and see them referred to as a CMS. Sometimes they are also called a framework, but they don’t seem the same as other frameworks like Rails and Zend. Can someone explain the difference between the two terms? Which is correct for Drupal and Joomla?

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3 Responses to “What Is The Difference Between A Cms And A Framework?”

  1. mernie11 12. Dec, 2009 at 2:09 am

    I’m no developer, so someone else may be able to better explain, but here’s what I understand:
    Drupal and Joomla are considered a CMS because they can be installed and ready to go virtually out of the box with a functional website and admin area to create dynamic pages. Hence the CMS attribution. Rails and Zend on the other hand are not “websites out of the box” and require you to work within the framework to create a CMS or web application.
    Drupal and Joomla are sometimes called frameworks because you can bypass the CMS items such as creating pages etc and just use the core code base for user registration and such then develop custom code (modules, web apps etc) that tap into the database using the framework they already have.
    Hope that helps until someone else comes along.
    Justin

  2. leader4h 12. Dec, 2009 at 2:16 am

    A CMS is something you can just install and use, like WordPress. Drupal and Joomla are frameworks – they allow you to write code for your site easier, but installing them as-is doesn’t give you a site.
    Rails is a server-side interpreter (for Ruby) like PHP. Zend is a lot of things – libraries, an IDE, a company.

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