You can use Drupal as such a framework, but it probably won't make sense unless you either (1) already know Drupal and hence will save time by using it, versus learning a new framework, or (2) intend to use Drupal for something else anyway, in which case learning Drupal only instead of Drupal plus another framework again saves you time.
As Victor Kane points out, it also depends on what you want to do. If it is similar enough to what Drupal and its contributed modules can already do, it might be more efficient to use Drupal rather than a more generic framework.
Otherwise, there are a number of other good frameworks out there you could learn and use, and those frameworks might be more generalized over the entire problem space of "PHP application building".
-- ..chris
On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 8:51 AM, Daniel Carrera daniel.carrera@zmsl.com wrote:
Hello,
Can you use Drupal core as a PHP development framework? Suppose you want to create a custom in-house web application which is not necessarily going to be a Drupal module. What would you use?
I am the maintainer of a custom PHP application. It's quite poorly written and I'm stuck maintaining it. I have been thinking that I'd like to rewrite it from scratch. I don't *need* any third party software to rewrite it, but it occurred to me that the final product might be better if I used a good PHP development framework. So I started googling for PHP application frameworks and I hit a Wikipedia page saying that some people use Drupal as a development framework. So I thought I'd ask about that here. Any thoughts?
I don't have a solid idea of what I'm looking for. I'm just looking to see what's available.
Cheers, Daniel. -- [ Drupal support list | http://lists.drupal.org/ ]