Frequently Asked Questions

Frameworks are software, designed to facilitate and speed up the process of developing web sites - you can think of them as a skeleton, a chassis or a scaffolding into which your site is woven.
Frameworks have a non-modifiable core, the rest can be altered, extended or replaced, while the site's visual aspect is separated from the site's functionality (the programming code). Frameworks can be very useful, even indispensable if you are building a substantial site to which you will be adding new content and the new features on regular basis.
If you just want to broadcast new content you might be better off with a Content Management System (CMS), like Wordpress or some blogging software (Joomla, Typo, Zine) or a blogging platform (Blogger, LiveJournal, MySpace, Tumblr).
Note that you can blog and publish from your User Zone to your site with NO need for framework or any other software.

A decision whether or not use a framework and, if so, which one is not to be taken lightly. Like any software, each framework will lock you in a certain way of doing things, so you should consider:
what features you really need to update your site and how often you will be doing this, how popular and how well established is the framework and its programming language, what is the learning curve and what kind of support will you be getting.
Also, never forget that a framework, like any other software must be regularly updated, for security and to keep with other changes in the Internet and the programming language used.

Here are examples of more popular frameworks, grouped by the programming language they are written in:
Cake, Codeigniter, Drupal, Symfony, Zend (PHP); Rails (Ruby), Django, Twisted (Python); ActionScript Foundry (ActionScript).

Netcells uses and supports ›Codeigniter - it is a widely used lightweight and flexible PHP framework. In principle with can help you with any other option - talk to us.

See also ›FAQ301- Should I upgrade my web site to be Framework-based ?