In web design and development, not only cutting edge innovations and open source solutions, but customized CMS frameworks are used to deliver the needed results. Frameworks in computers are typically layered structures which signal what type of programs should be developed and how they would interrelate afterwards. They can determine sets of functions and their interrelations, an operating system layers, the manner of standardization of communication at some network level, etc.
A content management framework, or CMF, is a system that has the function to facilitate the employment of customized software in order to manage website content. Such content management frameworks are combinations of the features of web application framework types and content management systems. The addition of a content management framework enables a content management system to be extended afterwards. There are the tools and the application programming interface, to facilitate extensions.
In content management systems, the programming code is written, and the user only has to input data for the website. In content management frameworks, the details involved can be likened to a system’s nuts and bolts. Using a framework, web developers write the code for the implementation of the specific code that is to be implemented on the specific website.
A content management system can be sufficient to deliver functionality. It is an already developed application which has a set of needed features. Most of these features are so coded that users can modify them and thus fit their needs. In other cases, when a lot of modifications have to be made to a CMS, in order to make it work in the desired manner, then websites are better developed on the basis of frameworks. A framework provides the classes, methods, events, which can be employed to create the targeted applications. Thus the structure is expanded into something useful.

Although at first the framework looks a bit like PHP framework, Ruby on Rails provides much cleaner and well designed code structure so the developer is never lost in long boring and ugly code to drift upon just to find a simple mistake. Although it lacks the Django ability to generate its own admin panel, it has some beautiful features which make’s it much easier for the developer to create one:

• Ruby on Rails is RESTful – which means it doesn’t only use the GET and POST parameters when
sending data to the server, but also PUT and DELETE which makes it easier to determine
whether we need to read, update, create or delete an item (given a blog post, gallery image or
simple menu)
 
• Simple routing – the framework handles most of the RESTful links by itself so the developer
writes only short functions to manipulate the data without worrying for complicated file
naming, long functions, etc.
 
• Scaffolding – the ability to generate pages that manipulate database data (although it lacks the
ability to update by itself when changing the database schema, that way the programmer can
easily generate pages for the admin panel and then to wrap around the custom functions and
the logging system)
 
• The Ruby language – despite the fact that there cannot be written many words for the
language (as we did with Python above), the Ruby language is very powerful and gives us the
opportunity to write less code in a beautiful manner compared to PHP (sometimes even
smaller than Python code). The main beauty of the language can only be felt by a developer
when he switches from PHP to Ruby, it is really hard to describe it in just a few words in a
presentational document. Also all of the mentioned benefits for the Python language above
apply here as well.
 
Why using Django/Ruby on Rails
 
There are several reasons to switch from PHP frameworks/content management systems to Python or Ruby:
 
• It’s much easier for new developers to continue a project written by past developers
 
• All the PHP frameworks are either clones of Ruby on Rails or Django but lack their simplicity and powerfulness
 
• No more SQL Injection hacking – the developer doesn’t have to worry about the security side most of the time, the framework/language does it for him
 
• If the client wants new feature, sometimes it’s much faster to add it to an existing Django/Ruby on Rails application than PHP. Even when a PHP system like WordPress, Joomla or Drupal is used, if the system lacks the feature, the coder is put in situation where he needs to find a module that does that feature and if there isn’t any, he has to spend a few days to play with the system API to build it, because most of the PHP CMS systems are very restricting when comes to custom solutions
 
• The speed is much faster than using a PHP framework/CMS This list can go on and on forever. Let’s just mention some of companies that use Ruby or Python instead of PHP:
 
 
• Google uses python for some of their projects
 
• http://www.djangosites.org/ is a site written entirely in Django with list of sites that have confirmed using Django as a development framework
 
• Twitter is written in Ruby on Rails for his frontend
 
• YellowPages.com uses Ruby on Rails
 
• GitHub.com uses Ruby on Rails
 
 

Conclusion
 

It doesn’t matter whether you’ll use Django or Ruby on Rails for your applications as both are very powerful frameworks and have some very unique features. On one hand you have Django where you have an admin panel on the fly for any custom project, or on the other you have the simple and powerful Ruby language where everything is organized.

Programming language specific benefits

As Django is built over the Python language, we have here a mature relatively old language that is both very simple for building minor projects and powerful enough when comes to huge
programs/websites that need to interact with the server on system level.

Some of the benefits over PHP include:

• There are no useless characters in the code like $ for variables or ; for command end so the programmer makes less mistakes which makes the developing, debugging and error finding much faster
 
• The programming actually takes less time as the code is smaller because of the powerful functions python supplies
 
• The code is more structured when comes to huge amount of programming lines. That makes it easier to read and new developers can easily start upgrading old code
 
• There are numerous of modules so the developer never has to do common tasks from scratch.

Django Specific benefits

As Django is the only framework that has the ability to generate admin panels on the fly depending on the database schema and table relations, it makes it the most powerful framework as of today when comes to sites where admin panel is widely used. The good thing here is that the generated admin panel has all the features without much custom modifications like:

• ACL (Access Control List) – the administrator is able to add new users and user rights on the fly as well as making user groups with rights to edit/delete content
 
• Simple but useful design – everything that any administrator will ever need is there: action history, adding/updating/deleting content, uploading images/videos/files, etc.
 
• Relation linking – for example if you need to add new user and then you need to add it to a group and the group is already configured by the developer to hold many users, you have a simple plus (+) sign on the right where you can add new group, configure it and then automatically return to adding the new user and finalize it without loosing any important data already entered. This is a very powerful feature that is missing in almost all the admin panels created for PHP content management systems.
 
• Better database handling – whether you use MySQL, PostgreSQL, or Oracle Django uses the powerful python database handling to provide easy data manipulation, migration, etc.

Other powerful Django feature is adding already built pieces of software to your site. For example if someone has already built a tagging feature for content, you can add it to your site on the fly and have tagging for every content you wish to use it.

Also Django has a very good module handling because of the powerful python language that lays beneath meaning you can connect python code with C/C++ libraries without installing any apache modules, etc.