Packt Publishing announced that ImpressCMS has won the Most Promising Open Source CMS category in their 2009 Open Source CMS Award.
While ImpressCMS took first place in this category, Pixie and Pligg weren’t far behind and settled for a tie in the first runner up spot.
ImpressCMS has featured in the top three in this category for the second time in a row, and has lived up to its reputation this year by winning the top spot.
Pixie and Pligg, on the other hand, featured in this category for the first time and managed to impress a lot of judges with their quality and support.
The "Most Promising" category is my favorite of all the categories in Packt's open source CMS award system. The CMSs in this category are lesser known applications requiring the judges on the panel to do a lot more homework than usual and sometimes coming up with some surprises in their analysis. This category is Packt's biggest contribution for getting lesser known open source CMSs the exposure they most likely deserve.
Last year, I had the honor of judging the Most Promising category and was pleased to see SilverStripe get the nod from this award. In 2008, ImpressCMS was also evaluated for this category and left me with a positive impression.
These were my thoughts a year ago about ImpressCMS:
With ImpressCMS a fork of XOOPS it wasn't a surprise to me that the CMS ranked high in scalability and performance as it has a mature code base. In the spirit of the "most promising" category, I looked at what ImpressCMS had to offer that XOOPS didn't provide.
The ImpressCMS project has added quite a few new features to their CMS since breaking away from XOOPS. Features that have been added to ImpressCMS since XOOPs includes native multilingual support, administrative user interface improvements, work flow improvements, and an improved installer. But what impressed me most about ImpressCMS is that it has dropped PHP 4 support in favor of PHP 5.2 or greater. To me this is an indication that ImpressCMS is looking toward the future and is not resting on the past successes of XOOPS.
ImpressCMS impressed me so much that I decided to add it to CMS Report's CMS Focus. ImpressCMS pushed XOOPS off of this list!
Now, to be fair to XOOPS, since writing the article XOOPS has made some significant updates to their CMS and has since then been brought back to my top 30 CMS list. However, it's very nice that ImpressCMS continues to stand on its own and continues to receive positive reviews.
Due to this award, I now have an interest in getting to know Pixie and Pligg a little better in the coming months. Both of those CMS are relatively new to me and possibly to you too.