"Drupal ceases being a Content Management Framework", says John a The Onion webdeveloper.

Since a while I have been going on about how I think Drupal is not a framework. Some call it a CMF, Content Management Framework. Some even dare to call it a web application framework (WAF). I think the latter have simply never worked with a real framework. But the CMF may be a correct label to put on Drupal. Or. Actually: might have once been.

Today, Boris Mann pointed me to an article by the developers of The Onion, once the <a href=”‘>pride of Drupal case studies.

The article explains some reasoning behind moving from Drupal to Django. Django, eventhough I never had the joy of working with it, is a real framework. But what struck me most, is a comment in the thread by one of the developers:As westononion pointed out at the start of this thread, that is not what this conversation is about, however, we were never able to use Drupal “as a product” since the form it existed in back when we adopted it was closer to a framework than a product. Five years ago, Drupal did not do what we needed it to do out of the box, so we took the tools and interfaces that it supplied and wrote a site with it. Since then it has evolved and become less like a framework and more of a one-size-fits-all solution (with appropriate modules).That is exactly it! Development of Drupal 7 (now in its final stages) had a strong focus on Usability, and user experience. Drupal 6 saw the gigantic rise of CCK and Views usage, continued in core in 7 (fields, CCK) and contrib (views). User experience is not something a WAF needs. At all. The fact that Drupal needs a usability team, means that it has aspirations to become an end-user product. And not a developer tool. I foresee some trouble in the coming years, when more developers move to frameworks to build their sites. Developers that Drupal actually really needs to stay up front in the world of CMSes.