How Drupal Compares to Major PHP Frameworks

December 13th, 2010

Drupal Many developers traditionally work with PHP frameworks such as Zend or Cake, and even venture into Ruby on Rails for certain applications. While Drupal started out as a community driven CMS it has 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 isn’t standing still, 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.

Benefits of Drupal as a Framework

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. As a result, using Open ID, Amazon web services and other popular libraries is just a few clicks away. While Drupal is a CMS and application driven framework, it delivers impressive value for those looking to get more out of the development process.

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.

In the latest version of Drupal you can find a comprehensive user authentication system with compatibility with major open login systems, a complete set of APIs that make data authentication and layers easier to communicate with, as well as integrated cache, Javascript and presentation layers. While the libraries native to Drupal are still maturing, its rich library of modules provides a basis upon which the framework can mature. For those looking for a combination of mature CMS and flexible libraries, Drupal is an ideal choice.