Thanks to a post at OpenSourceCommunity.org, I came across a conversion tool to allow you to import the SMF 1.1 database into a phpBB 3 site. Information about the conversion tool can be found in a forum post at phpbb.com. By the way, the script is still in beta, meaning that it works but you might find some bugs since it is not fully tested.
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.
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".
Packt Publishing is starting to announce the various winners in its Open Source CMS Awards. The first category announced was the Best Open Source Social Networking CMS.
Packt is pleased to reveal that WordPress is the first winner of the 2007 Open Source CMS Award, picking up the best Open Source Social Networking Content Management System. In a very close category, WordPress came out in front of Elgg and Drupal, who finished joint second.
Judges comments for their decisions included:
The project managing Elgg, an open source networking platform, announced a couple days ago that the software is "now more open than ever". The project will be opening "the development process, codebase, direction and software roadmap to the community".
More recently, expected changes at elgg.org were starting to take place with expectations of discussions taking place throughout the week.
This will mean structure both in tools to better support community led development of the software but will also mean putting together procedures how to organise it all.
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'm hoping that later today the American version of ComputerWorld will carry the Dries Buytaert article I came across on their Australian site. The article is an interview with Dries and titled, "Drupal: from a drop in the ocean to a big fish in the CMS World". Yes, it's a catchy title for the interview, but I like sub-heading even more.
I make it a habit not to post community squabbles that often take place in any IT project (whether open source or not). When people have the best intentions and respect the opinions of others, I don't believe it is right for me or anyone else to publicly exploit discussions that are meant to remain within the community. However, the conflicts going on at XOOPS.org have been made so public that it's hard for me to put a lot of faith in a project that treats its own people so poorly.
I'm still in need to read this InfoWorld article in its entirety, but thought it was worth mentioning now. InfoWorld's Mike Heck has written an article, Open source CMSes prove well worth the price, which reviews and compares five content management systems. The five CMS under review are Alfresco, DotNetNuke, Drupal, Joomla, and Plone.
The good news is that all five CMS ranked Very Good or higher. However, Alfresco was the only CMS that ranked Excellent with a score of 9.2. Plone 3.0 received the second highest ranking with a score of 8.6. DotNetNuke and Joomla tied for third and fourth place with a score of 8.4 which put Drupal a fraction lower with a score of 8.3. While none of these CMS ranked poorly, I'm sure the open source communities are bound to scrutinize over how the individual criteria were scored and ranked.
The XOOPS Foundation just announced that they have gone live with the XOOPS Foundation Web site. The purpose of the site is to help bring transparency to its open source community on the role it hopes to play in the in the current and future directions of the XOOPS Project.