CMS or Framework: What's Best for Your PHP Application?

When building a new PHP web application, an early but important decision is to choose between using a content management system (CMS) or a framework. While both deliver many advantages, your selection will impact your team's development process, final product, application capabilities, and ongoing maintenance needs.

In this blog, I break down the differences between a PHP CMS and a PHP framework. I then walk through the considerations involved for selecting the right option for your application, including flexibility, security, and more. Finally, I provide examples of best use cases for each.

CMS or Framework for PHP Apps: Overview

The first step to identifying if a CMS or framework is right for your PHP application is to understand the difference between the two options. Both can be used to build web applications that deliver excellent user experiences, but they serve different purposes and require varying levels of developer skill.

What Is a PHP CMS?

A PHP CMS is an already complete application or platform, written in PHP, that enables administrators and authorized users to manage (create, modify, delete) digital content (pages, blog posts, news, products, images, and much more) for a website without the need to write complex code.

A CMS for PHP applications typically comes with an admin interface separate from the publicly available website that simplifies tasks like user management, content creation, theme, and template management, updates, search engine optimization (SEO), or media management.

Beyond these features that usually come out-of-the-box with most CMS platforms, CMS ecosystems will usually have a plugin marketplace with hundreds to thousands of different plugins for enabling even more complex content management. If you or your team are experienced enough, most will also have documentation explaining how to build your own plugins in the case there isn’t a plugin that fits your specific needs, in which case you can extend the CMS to your liking.

Content Management Systems for PHP

Popular examples of different CMS for PHP platforms include:

• WordPress: WordPress still reigns supreme among the PHP CMS community. It has been the most popular CMS for PHP for many years due to its ease of use, popularity, and vast library of themes and plugins.
• Drupal: Drupal is a highly customizable and secure CMS often used for large-scale, enterprise-level websites.
• Joomla!: Joomla! is a flexible CMS suitable for building complex websites, offering a range of templates and extensions.
• October: One of the more customizable and extensible CMS for PHP, October is more modern than the rest. It is built on Laravel, and it allows the administrator to build out a fully custom user experience for its authorized users. It requires experience with PHP to setup and customize, but its flexibility is well worth it for the right teams.

There are many more, dozens even, of CMS for PHP options out there. Each comes with its own pros and cons. Some are very niche while others are built for a broader audience. There are some that are even specific to their industry, such as Medical or Realty. It’s worth exploring at least a handful of ecosystems before settling on what is right for your company, team, and use case.

What Are PHP Frameworks?

PHP frameworks are a set of reusable code, usually in the form of object-oriented class objects and methods, that provides a structured foundation for building web applications using PHP.

There are many common needs, such as database integration and management, user management, authentication and authorization, routing, and much more, when developing a web application. A PHP framework provides predefined and easy-to-use methods to these use cases. In providing these tools, a PHP framework simplifies and speeds up the development of web applications. However, a PHP framework differs quite a lot from a CMS, as it is not a fully working, complete PHP application.

For example, most frameworks work so well for building web-accessible APIs that they have dedicated documentation and even prebuilt skeletons for building APIs. Without the need for complex user interfaces, APIs can be built quickly and succinctly in a PHP framework using simple extensions of the framework’s routing, models, and controllers.

Typically, PHP frameworks are used for completely custom and self-maintained web applications. Perhaps you need to do a lot more than just content management. Maybe you need full control of building all user interfaces, including the admin area for user, data, file, and content management. Maybe you just need to build an API for business data abstraction, and you’ll handle the user interfaces later, or you’d prefer the simplicity of an API with a simple HTML and JavaScript front-end without all the bulk of a CMS. 

Popular PHP Frameworks

There are perhaps even more PHP frameworks than there are CMS platforms out there. Some of the most popular are:

• Laravel: Laravel is known for its elegant syntax (built by designers as an “artisan” framework) and powerful features for everything from routing, authentication, task scheduling, and a rich ecosystem of extensions for nearly every development need. It strives to have everything needed, out-of-the-box with its ecosystem.
• Symfony: Symfony is a highly flexible, modular, and mature framework often used for building large-scale enterprise applications. It focuses on reusable components and interoperability to the point of its modules being used in almost all other frameworks, including even Laravel.
• Laminas (previously Zend Framework): Laminas is a robust and enterprise-focused PHP framework with an emphasis on extensibility and customization. It also has a heavy focus on interoperability, contributing to and using PHP-FIG, the community’s recommendation for standard PHP syntax and best practices.
• Mezzio (previously Zend Expressive): Mezzio is a bare-bones, middleware focused, microframework that’s part of the Laminas ecosystem. Mezzio is great for building out APIs for backend development and other microservices.

CMS or Framework: At-A-Glance Comparison

When choosing between CMS or framework for your PHP application, there are many reasons to choose either option. Use this table as a quick-reference guide comparing the strengths and best uses for PHP frameworks vs. CMS for PHP.

Key Considerations for Choosing Between a CMS for PHP and PHP Framework

As with many developer decisions, there is no one-size-fits-all answer for if using a PHP CMS platform or PHP framework is better suited to your application. Flexibility and customization options, security requirements, and other factors will impact which is the right choice for your business.

Flexibility and Customization Options

When considering your needs for flexibility and customization, it’s important to know the needs for your web application, including future expansions and any limitations a CMS might introduce.

Is your website just informational or e-commerce and is mostly content-driven? Then a CMS is probably all you need. Is your website going to rely on integrations with complex, niche, or enterprise-level systems or legacy databases? Even then, depending on the expertise of your team, you could build a custom plugin for these integrations if one doesn’t already exist for the platform. However, CMS plugins and their development add their own layer of complexity to otherwise straightforward integrations that might outweigh the convenience of a CMS for PHP applications.

If having total control over the flexibility, scalability, and customization of the application and its source code is a priority for you and your team, then a PHP framework is probably your best choice. 

Security Requirements

CMS for PHP platforms are sort of a double-edged sword when it comes to security. On the one hand, it can be convenient. The CMS platform and its ecosystem is in charge of managing users and keeping the source code up to date, and you usually just need to click a button to upgrade to the latest version of PHP and have all the security patches up to date. However, this can also be a hindrance, as you’re stuck waiting if the CMS takes a long time to upgrade to the latest version. WordPress and a lot of their plugins had this issue with the advent of PHP 8 when a lot of the most popular WordPress plugins lagged in adopting PHP 8.

If your team has the expertise, a PHP framework can be good in this regard, because you oversee all the security, including the applications authentication itself. Keeping everything maintained can be complex, but at least you’re fully in charge of all the parts. Especially when planned and built properly, with features broken down into secured API endpoints and simple, flexible, and user-friendly frontends, a framework and a tailored solution can be a worthy investment.

Your Guide to PHP Security

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How to Improve PHP Security

Application Complexity

Depending on the complexity and type of complexity, a CMS might not be able to facilitate the exact needs of your PHP web application. CMS plugins can help expand the core, but even a plugin that might fit your niche may be out of support or might not even fit the exact need you have. Maybe building your own custom plugin would be just as complicated as building the whole website yourself using a PHP framework, since the feature might be at the core of your web application. 

Sometimes, it can just boil down to the expertise and preferences of your team and whether they’d prefer to figure out a CMS or build the website themselves using a PHP framework.

Developer Skill Set and Ease of Use

It’s no exaggeration to say that content management systems for PHP can be so easy to use, the user doesn’t have to have any development experience whatsoever to start up, customize, and manage a website. Even complex ones can leverage a CMS with extensions through plugins. Especially when using a managed host solution in the cloud, anyone can spin up a WordPress instance and build a themed website and be ready for market in a week or two of customization and content generation.

Frameworks make developing websites a lot easier with common tasks having convenient methods prebuilt and ready for use. The keyword here is “developing”, because there will still need to be an extensive amount of development to utilize a framework to build a web application. If you have a team of experienced developers at your disposal, they might prefer to use a framework to build a custom solution they know inside and out, because they built the application from the ground up.

Available Resources for Development and Maintenance

Depending on the CMS and the hosting provider you go with and how you set it up, maintenance can be as simple as a button press to upgrade the PHP version, CMS, pugins, and themes. If you maintain this regularly, developer intervention rarely, if ever, is needed.

Frameworks and custom applications, on the other hand, require a more nuanced and hands-on approach. Each new PHP version comes with necessary source code refactoring, and the frameworks and components themselves can require in depth and complex changes from version to version. It’s important to maintain this regularly (annually or even quarterly) to ensure you aren’t accumulating technical debt in the form of deprecated features and syntax overhauls from both a language and a framework perspective.

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Content Management Needs

As the name implies, if all your website consists of is basic content like pages, blog posts, images, and text, then CMS for PHP will work well for your needs. Some CMS ecosystems even have complex integrations with systems like payment systems.

PHP frameworks make it fairly straightforward to build admin interfaces for content management as well. Although, again, it’ll all need to be built from scratch or built upon skeletons the community has created for such applications.

CMS or Framework: Best Use Cases

Now that I've broken down the similarities, differences, and considerations for choosing a PHP CMS or framework, let's take a look at best use cases for each.

When to Choose a CMS for PHP

Content management systems, due to their mature and plenty of plugins, have become flexible enough to fit many needs from simple to complex. Not only can you build a blog or news website fairly easily, but you could also build a robust e-commerce solution with most CMS ecosystems.

When planning your website, consider the type of users who will need access for modifying content and what that content might be. Trial some CMS ecosystems like WordPress or Drupal, and be mindful of how they might solve the issues you need and provide a user-friendly way for users to maintain the content. If you need a simple admin interface to modify simple content like blogs, products, or web pages, then a CMS might fit perfectly.

When to Choose a PHP Framework

A PHP framework is great for building fully custom solutions for virtually any web application need. A good example of where a framework makes the most sense is within systems where the data and content management is already handled. For example, enterprise systems that have been around for a very long time and have interfaces already built for data entry, perhaps a hospital system. That data just needs to be accessible through a new web interface. Instead of building out a CMS with duplicate data, it’d probably be best to build a web application that, either through an API or MVC structure, grabs the preexisting data through framework database integration and displays it to the end web user.

That’s just one small example of how PHP frameworks fit the needs for building integration software, but they can be used for virtually any use case, including building your very own CMS to use for yourself.

Final Thoughts

Whether you decide that CMS for PHP or a PHP framework is right for your app, continuously maintaining and improving your application is critical for successful deployments. Regularly updating PHP, implementing monitoring protocols, and following other best practices keep your applications secure, compliant, and performant. But, with the quick PHP release cycle and new vulnerabilities being discovered daily, many teams struggle to keep pace.

That's where partnering with experienced PHP professionals, such as the Zend team, can help. We are the most trusted name in PHP, and we're ready to help tackle your biggest application challenges – regardless of if you use a CMS for PHP or a PHP framework.

Make Our PHP Experts Your PHP Experts

From migrations to upgrades, long term support through providing secure runtimes, Zend is your source for unparalleled PHP support. Explore our Professional Services, or reach out to speak with us directly.

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Additional Resources

• On-Demand Webinar - Are CMS Ecosystems Keeping Pace With PHP?
• On-Demand Webinar - Developing Robust 12-Factor Web Applications
• White Paper - The Costs of Building PHP In-House
• On-Demand Training - Developing a WordPress PHP Plugin
• Blog - The State of WordPress PHP Support
• Blog - How to Develop a WordPress Plugin
• Blog - Unpacking the Drupal PHP Support Lifecycle
• Blog - How to Configure nginx for Drupal 10 and PHP-FPM