Panes of Glass

I’ve been thinking about this question ever since I came across WAMP Server the other day. In their list of included packages, they noted Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, MediaWiki and phpBB. Until I read that, I had never considered a modular, open source web application to be a framework.

I am more familiar with the idea of Microsoft’s .NET platform, Ruby on Rails, Django, CakePHP, symfony, Prototype, etc. as real development frameworks. These are just a few of the myriad frameworks coming out these days. One might say that programming is now going to two camps–the true coders who come up with the frameworks and those that only use these frameworks for their apps. Nothing wrong with the latter, but can you really be considered a programmer when you are simply stringing together someone else’s code? But I digress….

Anyway, the interesting thing is that the only difference between a highly configurable web application like Drupal or WordPress and a framework like Ruby on Rails is that with the former, you are given an example application out of the box, and you’re encouraged to stick somewhat close to the original design and intent. With Rails or symfony, you are given a blank piece of paper and some really great tools. However, those tools keep you somewhat closed in to all the possibilities. If you want to go outside of the intent of the framework, you still have to extend it.

This is really no different than the modular and themed nature of the afore-mentioned open source web apps. I think it really becomes a matter of preference. If you are a tinkerer, you’ll probably do better to stick with WordPress or Drupal, figure out how to make it conform to your designs, and you’re done. I like this, but I’m much more likely to want to start with the blank sheet of paper. I just like the agony and the ecstasy of building things from scratch.

Just ask my friend Randy Hoyt. I have been on WordPress for years now as a “temporary solution” as I build my great authoring platform (still WordPress). He took WordPress, loved it, and made it look like nothing I’d ever seen. In the end, they’re all frameworks.

Tagged as .NET, JavaScript, PHP, Ruby on Rails, WordPress + Categorized as Software