http://www.mattfarina.com/2009/02/03/is-drupal-a-web-application-framework-or-just-a-content-management-system
I like to refer to Drupal as
I like to refer to Drupal as a Content Management Framework. Though you can build any type of Web app I can think of right now with Drupal, it is particularly useful for applications that need to have content management functionality.
In a recent Lullabot podcast Jeff Eaton's talk on building Twitter with Drupal during the DIWD seminar was briefly discussed. As I understood most of this talk was about why not to use Drupal for building Twitter, though you can.
Twitter is not about content management and much of Drupal's core functionality would not be used, but would add unnecessary processing overhead.
I would not call Drupal a general purpose Web application framework, in contrast to systems like Django or Rails.
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综述一下这个post: drupal 和framework各有特长,drupal从CMS开始,以no-coding的方式,提供了扩展性,而framework(以ROR为鼻祖)遵循一套开发模式,因为不是特定程序而是库,所以更加灵活。