Web Development – Difference Between a CMS and a Web Development Framework

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The web world is flooded with CMSes. Some tout their CMS as Web Development Framework. Some say it as Content Management Solution and nowadays i m hearing Content Management Framerowk.
When we hear "Framework", it sort of sounds like more complex and sophisticated.
Is there any specific difference between these two i.e. CMS and Web Development Framework?
Or Is it that a Web Development Framework can be a CMS and vice versa?

Thanks

Best Answer

The short answer is no.

A CMS or content management system is basically an application built ( maybe/most likely on top of a web application framework ) for the purpose of providing rich tools to maintain, organize and add content dynamically to a website. Good examples would be Drupal, Joomla, DotNetNuke etc.

A framework is different in that it is far more generic. It's almost like the saying "Every square is a rectangle but not every rectangle is a square" in that most commonly every CMS comes built on top of a popular or in-house framework making it useful to extend but it lacks the true genericism to actually make it a framework.

Take expression engine. Expression engine is built on top of CodeIgniter but adds far more libraries, helper and functionality mostly geared towards content management. It would be hard to do the extra work to dumb down expression engine to create a new product that isn't a CMS compared to just using CodeIgniter ( The framework ).

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