Free Software Linux

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:

SilverStripe was announced as the winner of Packt Publishing's 2008 Most Promising Open Source CMS Award. SilverStripe is today exclusively revealed as the winner of the 2008 Most Promising Open Source Content Management System. The SilverStripe project receive $2,000, holding off strong competition from CMS Made Simple in the first runner up position with ImpressCMS and MiaCMS finishing joint second runner up. Packt Publishing notes that SilverStripe's core team is heavily involved in not only their product but also with SilverStripe's users.

After much wait and debate the judges from PacktPub.com’s 2008 CMS Awards have announced the winner of the 2008 Best PHP Based Open Source CMS award. This year’s competition came looking to win. They set a standard difficult to match (and judge). And with the changing trends in the way the internet is being used, like the flood of social media and applications, the finalists had to prove they are ready for the future.

Drupal was announced the winner in Packt Publishing's 2008 award for Best PHP Based Open Source CMS. The Award for the best Open Source Content Management System written on a PHP/MySQL platform is today announced as Drupal. Receiving $2,000 as the judges’ and publics favourite, Drupal finishes ahead of Joomla! and CMS Made Simple, who finished on equal points as joint runners up and collect $500 each. As Packt notes, this has become an annual tug of war between Drupal and Joomla! for top spot in these awards.

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.

CMSMadeSimple.org: "This [CMS Made Simple 1.3] was originally going to be just a marginal improvement to hold people over till CMS 2.0 comes out, but we just kinda got carried away. There are new versions of the TinyMCE, ModuleManager, Search, MenuManager, News and FileManager modules, a massive improvement in translations, an automatic update notification mechanism, bugfixes, and lots of other tweaks to help you in your projects." Complete Story Advertisement: read more

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.