With the polls closing in ten days for some of the best open source CMS out there, if you haven't voted already, you need to head over to Packt Publishing and let your voice be heard.  There are five finalists for differing categories to choose from.  Voting for the winners in each of the categories opened 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.

This year, I'll be on the panel of judges for the Most Promising Open Source CMS.  The five fanalists in this category are:  CMS Made Simple, ImpressCMS, MemHT, MiaCMS, and SilverStripe.  I'm hoping to submit my choices for most promising CMS early next week.  This is going to be a tough choice for me as I have found myself impressed with each of the open source projects.  Many of these newer crops of CMS already have their eye on the ball by making sure they're ready to be used globally (multi-language capable, right to left text, etc).  Some of the older more established CMS still struggle to this day to make this happen in their projects.  

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 2008 Open Source CMS Award launched today, inviting people to visit www.PacktPub.com and submit nominations for their favorite Open Source Content Management Systems. Now in its third year, the Award has helped to support a variety of Content Management Systems gain recognition in a crowded and high quality marketplace.

In 2007, Drupal ousted Joomla! as the overall winner of the Award, in what was another very close contest. With the introduction of four new categories in 2007, the Award succeeded in expanding the opportunities for a wider range of Open Source Content Management Systems to benefit. MODx won the inaugural Most Promising Open Source CMS Award, confirming its position as one of the most respected new CMS’s available. "Winning the award was a tremendous honor for MODx" said Ryan Thrash, co-founder of MODx. "For the team, it validates the past two years of hard work" he concluded.

A new category for 2008 is the Open Source CMS MVP Award, which will recognize the contributions to projects made by individuals that often go unnoticed. According to Damian Carvill, marketing manager at Packt, the company that runs the Award, this will prove to be a significant award. "For the large majority of Open Source projects, it is the tireless work from enthusiastic individuals that enable its growth and adoption, and these are the people that Packt feels is necessary to identify" Carvill said.

Packt has opened up nominations for people to submit their favorite Content Management System at www.PacktPub.com/Award. The top five in each category will go through to final, which begins at the start of September. For more information, please visit Packt’s website www.PacktPub.com/Award.

Alfresco Software today announced the winners of its 2007 Annual
Content Excellence Awards. The debut year for the awards program
recognizes its top partners and contributors in the categories of
Partner of the Year, Content Management and Collaboration
Implementation of the Year, Web Content
Management Implementation of the Year, and Contributor of the Year, in
Europe and North America.

Complete Story

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.

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". 

Packt have awarded Joomla! $2000 for receiving the highest number of votes for 'Best PHP Open Source CMS', surpassing Drupal and e107 who came second and third, respectively.

The judges for this roundup noted Joomla!'s "good front-end for administrators and end-users" as well as the large community that supports the Joomla! project.

Last year Joomla! was the winner of the same (albeit modified) competition in which the CMS was awarded $5000.

Packt still has two more cash prizes to give away over the next two days for the 'Most Promising Open Source CMS' and 'Overall Winner'. However, considering the nominees for Overall Winner and Best PHP Open Source CMS are identical, the final results should come as no surprise.

Source: http://www.packtpub.com/award

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.