I use this for my blog site. It is an awesome Content Management System (I wouldn't call it a Web framework). It has some caveats but is as good as Django in my opinion.
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. :)
I would definitely call it a framework. Just one that includes a CMS on top (which is what they say in the first paragraph). Take away the ORM and HTTP server and some extensibility and I might agree but I think this definitely qualifies, though I know it's relative for the most part.
They call themselves a framework, though, not a CMS. And you've compared it to Django, which really is a framework, not a CMS. What part of Django would you say it is most directly comparable to?
The most striking similarity is the template syntax, it uses an Erlang implementation of Django templates. I think it draws some inspiration from Django's "batteries included" philosophy in a couple of ways. It encourages developing with small re-usable modules, like contact forms or blogs, that might be considered similar to the Django apps philosophy. It has an automatically generated admin area for your content/models, but it doesn't have a strong notion of model fields so you might have to do more admin view development (HTML/CSS/JS). It has an opinionated data and deeply integrated data model abstraction, although not being relational it isn't at all similar to Django's ORM.
In Zotonic a single Erlang VM hosts multiple sites (equivalent to Django projects), which can be nice for certain uses. Like most Erlang frameworks it is a little better at handling concurrency and AJAX-y ("realtime") websites than some of the more popular web frameworks, to support this the template language is extended to allow wiring UI elements to controllers without explicitly writing the JavaScript.
