Packt Publishing announced the five finalists for each category of its 2008 Open Source CMS Award.  Last year, Drupal was the overall winner. Voting for the winners in each of the five categories opens September 1 and ends on October 20, 2008.  This "public vote" will then be combined with votes by a panel of judges for the top three CMS in each category will then be voted for by a panel of judges.

Incidentally, this year I'll be on the panel of judges for the Most Promising Open Source CMS.

Overall Open Source CMS Award

• DotNetNuke
• Drupal
• Joomla!
• Plone
• TYPOlight

Most Promising Open Source CMS

• CMS Made Simple
• ImpressCMS
• MiaCMS
• MemHT
• SilverStripe
  

The fun continues this week with Packt Publishing announcing another winner in their 2007 Open Source Content Management System Awards.  Packt Publishing announced MODx as the winner of the Most Promishing Open Source CMS category!

Packt can exclusively reveal that MODx has won the Most Promising Open Source Content Management System in this year's Awards. As the fourth category winner, MODx came out on top ahead of TYPOlight and dotCMS, who came equal second.

Packt's announcement has a quote from MODx's co-founder,  Ryan Thrash, stating that  they "plan to live up to the Award title, and look forward to an incredible year for MODx complete with major releases, increased scalability and functionality, and even a few interesting surprises”.

Packt's Most Promising category is a very cool one and I think of all the award categories...this is the one that is most encouraging category for a young project.  I'm in agreement with Packt Publishing's announcement that this is an "extremely competitive and high quality field".