The XOOPS Project, world’s leading Open Source CMS (Content Management System), has released recently the newest version of its award winning software – XOOPS 2.3.1.

In the first seven weeks this new release has been already downloaded more than 17,000 times, confirming the strong position of XOOPS in the CMS market.

For the month of November, XOOPS was ranked as #24 overall project, and the #1 CMS project on www.SourceForge.net.

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I caused a little bit of controversy during my review of ImpressCMS as one of the five most promising CMS.

ImpressCMS impressed me so much that I decided to add it to CMS Report's CMS Focus.  ImpressCMS pushed XOOPS off of this list!

Some of the XOOPS fans thought I was being too harsh on XOOPS by knocking it off my top 30 list.  When I took a look at ImpressCMS (a fork of XOOPS) I was impressed with some of the new directions the project has taken since its departure from XOOPS.  I knew I wanted to put ImpressCMS on my top 30 CMS list, but in order to put one into CMS Focus I have to take another CMS off the list.  I choose to take XOOPS of the list.

After some discussion with "mamba", I have realized that I may have been premature in taking XOOPS out my top 30 list.  So as of today, XOOPS is back on the list.  Putting XOOPS on the list bumps off Dragonfly from CMS Focus.

The XOOPS Project, world’s leading Open Source CMS (Content Management System), has released recently the newest version of its award winning software – XOOPS 2.3.1.

The Project Leader, Mr. Jiang Taiwen, stated that this release is significant for two reasons: (1) it is merging the two existent XOOPS branches of 2.0 and 2.2 and (2) it is building a bridge towards the next generation of XOOPS – version 3.0.

The major improvements are addition of Extended Profile and Private Messages modules, and standardizing on one Extended DHTML editor as the default across all XOOPS modules. The administrators will also enjoy the addition of EXM Admin GUI.

There are always two perspectives to a “Content Management System” – the developer’s side, and the user’s side. And XOOPS 2.3 is breaking some more new grounds in both areas for the XOOPS community.

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.

Earlier today, Packt Publishing announced the winners of their 2008 Open Source CMS Most Valued People Award.  The MVP is a new category for Packt's annual Open Source CMS Awards.  In this category, "names were put forward by members of the Content Management System's development team and community and represent the exceptional support, guidance, and sheer amount of time that the MVPs have given up to support the development and growth of the respective CMS". 

Instead of just copying the winners list from Packt's site, I had hoped to do something different here. I started with a goal to look for each of the MVP's personal blog or project site,  I had hoped to find acknowledgments of the award was given by the MVP themselves or by someone else on their behalf.  Evidently I started searching a little too early and I only came across mentions of the awards from three four of the projects: Drupal (Earl Miles), Joomla! (Johan Janssens), and XOOPS (Onakazu). Plus... Plone.

Below are some excerpts from or about these open source MVPs.  If you are aware of more of the award winners recognizing or being recognized for their contributions...I would appreciate a link to the post.  Open source contributors like these MVPs deserve all the recognition we can give them.

XOOPS.org: "The XOOPS Development Team is pleased to announce the release of XOOPS 2.3.1 Final.

This release is mainly focused on bug fixes for XOOPS 2.3.0 release according to community feedback.
A couple of bugs in upgrade scripts from 2.2 to 2.3 have been fixed, as well as profile field access problems.

Debug information visibility has been improved according to community demands, debug information level is enabled as a temporary solution.  Meanwhile XOOPS news aggregator has been improved for non UTF-8 charset websites, multiple feeds are enabled."

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The April issue of Adobe Edge contains the article, Review of open source content management systems. The article provides an overview of what the author describes as "five of the top open source software (OSS) solutions". The five open source CMS included in the author's list are CMS Made Simple, Drupal, Joomla!, WordPress, and XOOPS. After reading the article, I found myself wondering how we "reviewers" can actually improve our reviews of open source CMS. More importantly, I've come to the realization that I can no longer claim to be non-biased in which CMS I believe is the best out there.

The author does a fine job in the article describing the similarities and differences between the CMS being reviewed. However, one of the issues I have in this article and many others I've read that review CMS is the big jumps in the conclusion:

Drupal, Joomla!, and XOOPS are best for building an e-commerce site because all three offer:

• Inventory management
• Support for third-party payment processing mechanisms (such as PayPal)
• Modules for shipping and sales tax calculators
• Shopping cart functionality

While it is true that Drupal, Joomla! and XOOPS can do e-commerce, none of these CMS can do that straight out of the box. I can just imagine a shop owner or design company trying Drupal, Joomla!, or XOOPS for the very first time and wondering, "how the heck do I get a shopping-cart into the CMS?". While the author does hint in the article that third-party modules are needed to make the e-commerce work, I think the author would have been better off better explaining that "some work is required" to get those features into the CMS.