Develop the Framework or the CMS
Many CMS projects focus on the Framework development in first place then the CMS itself. This works great for some projects such ezPublish and ezComponents. Others prefer to focus more on the framework, but in the same time offering the CMS product such Seagull PHP Framework. The different approach have its advantages and inconvenient, for example Seagull announced recently the community edition CMS based certainly on its framework and offering robust solution for end-users. The development of a robust framework is one of the keys to create a successful CMS, while most of the content management tasks aims to eliminate coding by web administrators, the framework guarantee the flexibility and the continuation of the project.
I'll mention here LifeType, a PHP based multi-blogs platform, one of the solutions that I have used and recommended to many professionals such Albawaba, and that I find its development very interesting not only as a blogging platform but also as a framework and CMS to manage content in a very easy and convivial way.
How can the Framework help in the CMS development
The framework is the core of the CMS itself. It provide the main functionalities for developers for the different features. What is great when you have an excellent framework, very well documented, implement new features become too much fun and easy. Here come the power of frameworks to offer the possibility to add components or addons creating new features with the very minimum coding required.
The event based frameworks are very interesting concept. It provide a great flexibility for developers to create filters, patches, different actions on the core application.
More Content Management, Less Code Management
The idea of having a strong framework is very important to evaluate the power of a CMS. Even that the content management solution of some CMS products don't look very powerful but they have the ability to add features very easily through components, or directly in the core.
This is interesting for developers or companies interested into developing solutions around an existent open source CMS/Framework for their internal use or as a product. The less coding to do is always better for professionals, looking for long term solutions, and of course the minimum should be available to talk about a ready to use CMS, able to evolve to a strong customized and unique solution.
Conclusion
I find the approach of the framework more powerful and useful to develop than the CMS itself. Many projects offer solutions but with a very weak code, and then spend lot of time and effort to correct bugs, creating patches, adding features, this will result in many cases slow solutions, lack of professionalism, even if the solution become widely adopted its life cycle is really short.
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