[support] Drupal as a PHP development framework?

[Seth Freach]

Daniel,
Short answer: Yes.

I have been previously and currently am involved with a few web app 
projects that were started or rewritten from scratch on Drupal.  In 
fact, the reason that Drupal was chosen over any of the other CMS's 
available is specifically because of its superiority amongst its peers 
in the CMS space as a PHP development framework.

The most important thing in my experience is to make sure that you 
approach the project from a correct perspective.  You'll get the best 
results if you think of the app being constructed *with* Drupal, doing 
it the Drupal way.  This is a very different thing than building it *on 
top of* Drupal, where you try to reach down and leverage Drupal 
functionality when it suits you.  This approach might cause you to 
rethink a lot of the application and data architecture in a rewrite.  
Drupal can do the job wonderfully, but know that it probably won't just 
be a "rewrite", but rather a "redesign", from the data model on up.  
Allowing Drupal to handle all of  your user management, for example, 
sounds great, but thinking of how Drupal users are going to interact 
with your application's data will force you to rethink how Drupal will 
best do this.  Ideally, it would become less and less your application's 
data and more and more Drupal's content, structured in the way that 
Drupal organizes its content (nodes, CCK, possibly OG's, ...), and 
accessed the way that Drupal accesses content (Views, perms, ...)

...if that makes sense ;)

Seth
 

Daniel Carrera 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.
>