Is Drupal A Web Application Framework or just a Content Management System?

I would call it both. :)

I would certainly include it in the "Web Application Framework" category. I regard the ones you mentioned (CakePHP, Zend, etc.) as Programming frameworks. (You must be a programmer to use those) I would consider Drupal to me more of a point-and-click Web Site Framework. Not really sure where all that boils down in terms of what to actually call it. But I think the big difference is that Drupal is so very point-and-clickable. You can do a TON of advanced features (think CCK/Views/Panels) before you see your first .

This is a hilarious satire on "frameworks":
http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.219431.12

Its with an innocent man who wanted to build a spicerack, needed a hammer, but found out things like:
"When we stepped back and looked at the global tool infrastructure, we determined that people were frustrated with having to manage and operate a hammer factory factory, as well as the hammer factory that it produced. That kind of overhead can get pretty cumbersome when you deal with the likely scenario of also operating a tape measure factory factory, a saw factory factory, and a level factory factory, not to mention a lumber manufacturing conglomerate holding company. When we really looked at the situation, we determined that that's just too complex for someone who really just wants to build a spice rack."

It seems to me that the Drupal community uses the word Framework more as a disclaimer than a definition. It's used to demonstrate the difference between a Drupal out-of-the-box installation versus its potential. A website built with Drupal might be a Content Management System, but (arguably) Drupal itself is not. This is an important, yet potentially confusing distinction.

So, Framework people are now offended because we've encroached upon their vernacular. By the same token, I don't think we could really use the word Toolkit, which probably applies better to the Drupal API than to Drupal itself.

Content Management Starting Point won't work, since it sounds stupid and implies that Drupal doesn't do enough.

I briefly considered Foundation, but since so many open source projects have non-profit foundations backing them, that would probably be confusing as well.

So what we need is a new word. Lacking one, the best I can offer is perhaps a new slogan: Content Management Done Right.

Micah

I like to refer to Drupal as a Content Management Framework. Though you can build any type of Web app I can think of right now with Drupal, it is particularly useful for applications that need to have content management functionality.
In a recent Lullabot podcast Jeff Eaton's talk on building Twitter with Drupal during the DIWD seminar was briefly discussed. As I understood most of this talk was about why not to use Drupal for building Twitter, though you can.
Twitter is not about content management and much of Drupal's core functionality would not be used, but would add unnecessary processing overhead.
I would not call Drupal a general purpose Web application framework, in contrast to systems like Django or Rails.

About a year ago I built a CRM application using CodeIgniter and now when I think back, I could have done pretty much everything in Drupal itself. Back then, I hadn't experimented with Drupal Modules yet.

I think once someone writes a module for Drupal, it just opens up another world for them. Until someone has written a module, they don't really understand the Drupal is as much a Framework as Symfony, CakePHP or CodeIgniter.

Drupal Framework portion already includes common things like User Registration, Access Control Based on Roles and Permissions, Error Logging System, Pagination, Database Abstraction and Templates to name just few.

I would call it CMS + Framework. I don't like the "CMS Framework" terminology as it seems to confuse the things rather than explain it.

Drupal can be your content management system, blog management system, your development framework, your back-end or whatever you need it to be. I created my personal blog with it, I used it as the front-end for a java-based media transcoder and Drupal is the back-end of mnm.be which runs on a completely custom AJAX-driven front-end. There's the installation profiles, the contributed modules, the smaller helper modules such as ahah_helper, drupalmu_helper and translation_helpers and of course there's the powerful api itself.

Yes, Drupal is what you need it to be.