[jol]

there is a difference between an web-app and web-site, drupal is a CMS, it is meant to build web-sites. Or am I wrong about what drupal is? This is the same as tons of people that use wordpress as the best CMS, wordpress is good fit for many of those cases, but not all

[ssharp]

I think Drupal was built to be a "content management framework" and not a "content management system". Out of the box, a system like Wordpress is substantially more limiting that a system like Drupal. You see Drupal projects like OpenScholar that are built with Drupal but are highly customized and don't really even look like Drupal. It's certainly possible to build a full-fledged web app with Drupal, whereas CMS systems typically have one core function. You can use Drupal as a CMS, but it does other stuff.

For most CMS use-cases I've come across, I'd rather use Wordpress. It's simpler for most website needs and provides substantially better default UI to editors.

[abruzzi]

Drupal is a CMS, but a highly extensible one. Yes, you can replace any just about any core feature. I needed a register for a new account feature that integrated with other parts of our site, so I rolled my own. I'm not super familiar with Wordpress but i didn't get the impression that it scaled to large sited with lots of pages (we have about 1000 static pages)

[mattkevan]

This is going to be bigger in the upcoming Drupal 8, but Drupal can already be used as more than just a CMS. HTML is just one interface it can provide, along with JSON/REST/XMLRPC/SOAP etc.

This means you could have a native app and a website powered by the same Drupal install. Or, you could ditch the theming and templating layer entirely and create your own.