[xaritas]

It sounds like you are comparing Zotonic to Django in an apples-to-apples sort of way, so I'm not sure why you don't consider it to be a framework. I think that it's definitely a framework as much as Django is, it just happens to come with a CMS app built on top of it pre-installed, which looks complete enough to be "the product" when it's really just a starting point. The project website could be clearer about this.

Having said that it's not "just a CMS," it is in fact pretty awesome for building simple marketing/brochure mostly-static-but-with-a-contact-form-and-blog type websites. Individual websites can be hot loaded into the running daemon, and started, stopped, and rebuilt from a git repo through a web based interface. I host a couple local business sites for some recurring income and I'm strongly considering porting my existing clients to it and using it for similar sites in the future.

Despite that simple use case, I wouldn't dismiss it for more complex projects, as long as, e.g., its data model (a triplestore built on top of postgres) works for you.

In summary, in my opinion it has some caveats but is as good as Django. :)