This year, I was given the privilege of sitting on the judging panel for Packt Publishing's 2008 Most Promising Open Source CMS Award.  Judges on the panel were required to select their top three CMS based on a number of factors including performance, usability, accessibility, ease of configuration and customization, scalability and security.  These top three CMS were to originate from the five finalists in the most promising category which included: CMS Made Simple, ImpressCMS, MemHT Portal, MiaCMS, and SilverStripe.

As I promised earlier, I'm posting online my notes and comments on how I ranked all five finalists in the most promising category.  For better or for worse, Packt Publishing also gives their judges a lot of flexibility in how they rank a CMS.  While I wouldn't consider this a complete analysis of the CMS, it should provide enough information on the impression each CMS left me when reviewed.  While the methodology for determining the best CMS may be subjective, I do try to design my ranking of the CMS to be fair and non-biased.

The order in which I ranked the top "most promising" CMS were:

1. SilverStripe (my highest ranked)
2. ImpressCMS
3. CMS Made Simple
4. MiaCMS
5. MemHT Portal (my lowest ranked)

In order to come with the above rank, I chose to use factors such as performance, usability, accessibility, ease of configuration, ease of customization, scalability, the the amount of support/documentation offered through the project's site/infrastructure.  I did not use security as a factor in my ranking.  Since the CMS must be less than two years old to qualify in the most promising category, it seemed unfair to rank these CMS by security since by definition they're not fully matured projects.

For the second straight year, Packt Publishing has announced Drupal as the recipient of its Overall Open Source CMS Award.  Drupal was also the winner this year in the award category for Best PHP Open Source CMS.

Packt’s annual Open Source Content Management System (CMS) Award reached its climax today with the announcement that Drupal has won the Overall category, collecting a first prize of $5,000. Three months after it was launched and a staggering 20,000 votes later, Drupal finished ahead of Joomla! and DotNetNuke to retain the Award it won in 2007.

Joomla! also placed second in the Overall category followed by DotNetNuke for third position.

Finishing in second place and receiving $3,000 was Joomla!, the youngest of the three finalists and a previous winner of the Overall Award. Judges were impressed with Joomla’s ease of installation and ability to get a website up-and-running in a short space of time. Particular praise was reserved for its sizeable and enthusiastic community, which has allowed the project to grow so quickly in such a short space of time.  

In third place and receiving $2,000 was DotNetNuke, the only CMS in the final that is written in VB.NET for the ASP.NET framework. DotNetNuke received positive feedback from judges who were impressed with its ease of development and security implementation features.

A complete list of current and previous winners the Open Source CMS Awards can be found at Packt Plublishing.

SilverStripe was announced as the winner of Packt Publishing's 2008 Most Promising Open Source CMS Award.

SilverStripe is today exclusively revealed as the winner of the 2008 Most Promising Open Source Content Management System. The SilverStripe project receive $2,000, holding off strong competition from CMS Made Simple in the first runner up position with ImpressCMS and MiaCMS finishing joint second runner up.

Packt Publishing notes that SilverStripe's core team is heavily involved in not only their product but also with SilverStripe's users.

It received universal approval from the judges for its features and was praised as an excellent option for companies who want a powerful open source website that is professionally created and well supported. The judges were complimentary about SilverStripe’s scalability, use of Ajax, its healthy community and the impressive levels of input on the forums from its developers.

I had the honor of being one of the judges on the panel for Packt Publishing's 2008 Most Promising Open Source CMS Award.  My vote also went for SilverStripe followed by ImpressCMS for second place and CMS Made Simple for third place.  Since I wasn't sure how the other judges on the panel were going to vote, I'm always a little nervous of being too far off from the consensus.  Needless to say, I feel validated.  In a few days, I'll throw my notes online for how I ranked all five finalists in the most promising category.

It is estimated that there are nearly 1,700 applications in the content management system (CMS) market. In an ideal world, I would love to cover all of them here at CMS Report.  Since your time and my time is finite, I have instead chosen to limit the number of CMS applications focused here to no more than 30 applications. Since the list of applications included under "CMS Focus" is meant to include today's content management systems, it is logical to assume the list will change over time in order to stay relevant.

The CMS applications listed in this section are not necessarily the most popular nor are they always true content management systems.  Instead the content manage systems that make up my top 30 are what I consider Web content management "game changers".  A number of the applications on this list are CMS that I've personally worked with.  Other applications on the lists are supported by a community of developers, project leaders, or users just have the right stuff to make their CMS successful and get noticed.

Drupal Themed is news and content submitted by you the Drupal
community user. It works just like the popular site Digg.com. If you
have a new theme, plugin or just want to show off your Drupal powered
website this is the place to do it. Why Drupal-Themed? Well, there really isn't any place one can submit Drupal news and
get noticed, besides forums etc. so we decided to launch a site that
would be a centralized place to post news regarding Drupal and the
entites surrounding it.

Visit us: http://www.drupal-themed.com

First, there was HOT or NOT where you could rate the pictures of men and women. A great site to visit if you're single and don't have a date on a lonely Friday night. But life changes and now you have a family. Do what do you do if you're married with nothing to do on a Saturday night?

Yes, you can always watch Curious George with the family, but how do you get back to your old life in a responsible manner? Well, now you have an alternative, Web Hot or Not?

David Sifry (Technorati) explains how webhotornot.com came to exist.

How did it come to exist? When I was in Madrid visiting my friend and investor Martin Varsavsky
late last year, we had a fun time brainstorming ideas to help find and
rate interesting web sites, and we came up with the idea. Who knows,
perhaps the ratings might even be useful if people start using the site
- sort of a "prediction market" for web sites. Most of all, we just wanted to create a simple site that was fast-loading and fun to use. We both love Hotornot, so we figured we'd do an homage.

I received an email from CPG Dragonfly CMS advocate, Dizfunkshunal. He observed that we do not cover Dragonfly here too much. Sadly, Dizfunkshunal is correct in his observation, in the past we have posted only a few articles regarding Dragonfly. How did this happen?

Articles regarding a particular content management system get posted on this site by two significant groups of people. Those two groups of people that have the power to put focus on a specific CMS are you and me. The 30 CMS that I am most impressed with today are listed on my site is the left-sidebar under "CMS Focus". This list has changed and will continue to change over time. If you want to help change that list then help persuade me either through comments or by submitting your own stories to CMSReport.com.

Yesterday, I talked about CMS Report's five most read articles that were published in 2007. Today, let's talk about seven of our articles that remained at the bottom of the dog pile. Listed below are Seven Great CMS Report Articles that you few people read.

1. A review of ReviewBasics
2. Introducing Facebook to the Boss
3. United States students continue to fall behind in IT education
4. Saying Goodbye to Old Media
5. Thunderbird 2.0
6. Virtually impressed with Microsoft
7. Getting more work done through less innovation

Most of the articles listed above were read less than 1000 times. Yet, in my opinion, the articles are some of the better articles I wrote in 2007. Hey, some of the stories even have pictures (something I rarely do on my site). Perhaps you could make it one of your 2008 New Years resolutions to read the articles?