PacktPub Announces Winners of its Open Source CMS Awards
Packt Publishing has announced the winners of its prestigious CMS Award for open source content management systems: the competition features a total $20,000 in prizes for its four categories.
The judging process has been going on for about three months: nominations were closed on August 25th, while the finalist were announced on September 1st. Voting has been open until October 20, while the final results have been rolled out within Oct 27 and the end of the month.
The awards are divided into four main categories:
- The “Best Other Open Source CMS“ is being awarded to the content management system that is not as well-known to the public as other major platforms such as WordPress or Joomla!, but is still worth mentioning because of its unique features;
- The “Best PHP Open Source CMS” award is given to the CMS that best suits the “open source” label, based on parameters such as user community support and distribution of the source code;
- The “Most Promising CMS” award, similarly to the “Best Other Open Source CMS”, is given to the platform that might not be as well-known or feature-rich as some of the other competitors, but has the best potential for growth in the next future;
- Finally, the “Overall Winner” is the main prize for the absolute best open source CMS in the opinion of both judges and webmasters.
The Results
Starting October 28, Packt has started announcing the winners for the various sections of the awards.
Winning the $2,000 prize for the “Best Other Open Source CMS” is Plone, the Python-based content management system built on the Zope web application server platform. The judges were particularly complimentary about Plone’s extensible platform and level of support, along with the user friendliness of the entire product.
In second place, dotCMS grabbed a $500 prize and dotNetNuke grabbed the third, ease of use and simple hosting/installation process being key factors in determining their final position.
As for the award for the best PHP-based open source CMS, Drupal was this year’s winner. The judges awarded its strong social application capabilities; Joomla! and CMS Made Simple came in tied at second place and both received their $500 prize.
The prize for the most promising open source CMS went to SilverStripe, a little-known, but extremely flexible and easy-to-use content management system. Looking at screenshots of the platform, it would seem that judges made the right call, and hopefully we will hear more about SilverStripe in the next future. The second place went to Cms Made Simple, while the third place was, again, a tie between ImpressCMS and MiaCMS.
Finally, the award for the “Best Overall Open Source CMS” went to Drupal for the second year in a row. This, along with the Packt award for the most valued contributor given to Earl Miles, make the platform the real winner this year, despite predictions that WordPress would have been the winner, if not one of the main protagonists, this year. Since Joomla! and dotNetNuke were at the second and third place respectively, this means WordPress did not appear in the finalists at all, a decision that has puzzled some.
Still, the $5,000 grand prize appears more than deserved for Drupal, whose already vast user community is rapidly expanding along with the platform features and core modules that are finding more and more recognition among the public.
Tags: Open Source CMS Awards, Packt Publishing, PacktPub
Dario Borghino
Dario Borghino is a computer engineering student at Turin's
Polytechnic, Italy. He started writing science and technology related
articles in February 2008 and his articles have appeared on sites such
as ISEdb.COM, eHow and Suite101.com. You can visit his personal Web site here.
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