A new version of e107 has been released, e107 0.7.11. There is also a hint that it's time to think about version 0.8! If you haven't tried e107 for a while, I encourage you to do so!

During my tenure as a judge in 2007 for Packt Publishing, I surprisingly ranked e107 as number two in the Overall Winner category. Given the final outcome, the other judges didn't agree with me...but I stand by my position. e107 is an open source content management system worthy of your consideration.

New year ... new e107 version - The e107 team is proud to present the latest release of e107, version 0.7.11.

Packt Publishing announced that Drupal has won their Overall 2007 Open Source Content Management System Award.

After three intense months of voting, Packt Publishing can today announce that Drupal has won the Overall 2007 Open Source CMS Award. With 18,000 votes on Packt’s website, coupled with the expert opinions from a panel of judges, Drupal succeeds Joomla! as the overall winner and receives a cheque for $5,000.

Joomla!, last year's award winner, placed second this year and was awarded $3,000. CMS Made Simple collected $2,000 with a placement in the number three spot. This year, Packt awarded open source CMS projects a total of $20,000 in prize money in five different categories.

The announcement by Packt quotes Jeff Eaton, a core developer speaking on behalf of Drupal, as saying, "We've worked hard to make Drupal as flexible, as scalable, and as accessible as possible. It's a great week for all of Open Source; the winners in every category have shown that OSS can produce powerful solutions for a wide range of needs." The announcement by Packt also reaffirms Jeff's statement that all the projects that made it as finalists should be congratulated.

By golly, Joomla has been awarded as the Best PHP Open Soure CMS in Packt Publishing's 2007 awards.

Joomla! is today revealed as the Award's third category winner, claiming Best Open Source PHP Content Management System. Last year's overall winner came out on top ahead of Drupal in second and e107 in third place and receives $2,000.

Joomla! was selected as the winner in the Best PHP category due to "its good front-end for administrators and end-users, which gives users a simple and traditional company website straight out of the box".

Now here is the interesting and confusing part, just because Joomla has won the Best PHP Open Souce does not mean they'll be winning the Overall Winner category.  How can this be if the same five open source CMS (CMS Made Simple, Drupal, e107, Joomla, and PHP-Fusion)  that were selected as finalists in the Best PHP are also in the Overall Winner Category?  Well my friends, each category has a different panel of judges that may approach CMS applications with a different perspective.

I found this on one of the Joomla blogs, Croatian community site converts from e107.

The biggest Croatian community site outside of Croatia converts to Joomla. Croworld.ca has been around for 3 years, although just recently went through a e107 -> joomla conversion. We support the Croatian community outside of Croatia by trying to keep everyone in tune with what is going on in the community. http://www.croworld.ca

So why am I posting this here at my site?  Could it be that I want to rub it into the faces of e107 users that they lost another site to Joomla?  Absolutely not!  While croworld.ca is designed well with Joomla, it's actually the content that I'm more interested than the CMS this time around.

"I have been alerted to a serious issue with the e107 Gold System plugin. Normally we try not to mention vulnerabilities with plugins as this is not our code and it's much harder for us to get it fixed.

However, in this instance I know the exploit is out in the wild so I thought it was serious enough to mention it here. I have alerted the author of the code and hopefully a fix will be out soon."

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There is only one week left to vote for the CMS finalists in Packt Publishing's Open Source Content Management System Award.  If you haven't voted for what you think is the best open source CMS, I would encourage you to vote.  In my opinion, you should vote even in those categories where your favorite CMS may not have made it through the public nomination process.  Remember, not everyone is that sold on open source content management systems.  In other words this award, and those like it, is a chance to help newcomers find the best of the best in open source CMS.

The voting results should really be very interesting this year with five finalists to choose from in each of the five categories.  The five categories in the Packt award are  Most Promising, Best PHP CMS, Best Other (Non-PHP) CMS, Best Social Networking CMS, and Overall Winner.  The five finalists in the Overall category include CMS Made Simple, Drupal, e107, Joomla!, and PHP-Fusion.

Since I'm needing some time to figure out how best to use the Drupal contributed Advertisement module, I've decided to promote via banners each of the five CMS finalists in the Overall CMS Winner category.

I've finally found the time to package up a new release. It's probably long overdue based on the number of fixes that are in this release, so here it is...finally!

This release is a bugfix release only (as will all of the 0.7.x future releases). It contains a huge list of fixes.

Wyatt Barnett in his Sitepoint article, "I've Never Met a Boxed CMS I Like" makes some very valid points about content management systems straight out of the box. Take note that he isn't just talking about commercial products but also open source systems. His first complaint about "boxed" CMS:

The first issue is that the very nature of a CMS is not easily boxable, without creating an application that tries to do everything for everyone and fails at doing most things particularly well. The tasks required for content management are generic, but every organization has a far different focus when it comes to how that content should be managed and how it thinks about that content. I have lost days of meetings trying to help subject matter experts understand that an article, according to this system, is really a page. Trying to make a generic application to handle this for all comers is a very, very tricky prospect.

Sadly, his post doesn't really offer a solution. I assume building your own CMS is the only alternative to the boxed version. But I have to ask, who really has the time? I think there are some obvious reasons you see so many capable software developers are using open source software such as Wordpress, TYPO3, e107, Alfresco, and Drupal for their Web presence.

The folks over at e107.org have released e107 version 0.7.6.  Don't let the numbers fool you, this is the first new release of e107 in half a year.  This new version offers some new features, but for the most part the release fixes security vulnerabilities, stability issues and a number of bugs. 

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