Content Management

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 creating quite an exciting week in the world of open source content management systems.  The publishing company announced the winner of their Best Open Source Other CMS Award and it's mojoPortal!

Packt can exclusively reveal the second category winner of the Open Source Content Management System Award as mojoPortal, winning Best Other Open Source CMS. In another tight category, mojoPortal came out ahead of Plone and Silva who came second and third respectively.

Congratulations to mojoPortal for recieving the award.  mojoPortal holds dear to CMS Report's heart on the simple fact that it's project leader, Joe Audette, really was the very first project leader that sent us an e-mail to call attention to his content management system.  I feel like we've grown up together.

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:

Last weekend, both Linux Today and Linux.com provided links and excerpts to an article I posted here at CMS Report.  You can see some of the stats on my newly quantified site at quantcast.com.

I was really surprised not only find out that Joomla! 1.5 is going through a third release candidate, but will likely be followed with more release candidates.  In most projects, the release candidate is a nearly-done final product where the only thing left is to make sure all the i's are dotted and all the t's are crossed.  Not so with Joomla! 1.5.

Johan Janssens's writes in his post, "Is Joomla! 1.5 RC3 really a release candidate?":

CMS Made Simple 1.2 has been released.  In their announcement, the project indicated being pleased at the number of people that participated in the beta cycle participated in the beta cycle helping to help make CMSMS 1.2 a stable released.

Last month, we reported some of the improvements and new features we thought you could expect in CMSMS 1.2.  Below is list listing of changes as worded in the official announcement of the 1.2 release.

A couple days ago my jaw dropped when I read CMS Watch's article, "Do you need an ECMS, WCMS, or Portal?".   Last week, Deane Barker of Blend Interactive and Gadgetopia had mentioned how he was uncomfortable seeing enterprise content management systems and Web content management systems lumped together in the same comparison article.  I responded to him that the boundaries between the two information systems do seem to get blurrier and blurrier all the time.  In the CMS Watch

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.

While the content management system, SilverStripe, has been on my radar for some time I never really took the time to cover the Web application here at CMS Report.  Now it so happens that SilverStripe has been nominated as one of the most promising open source CMS out there.  About the only thing I can do to correct my oversight is to put SilverStripe on a list of the "top 30" CMS we focus on here at CMS Report.  Sadly, mostly out of nostalgia, SilverStripe will be bumping Simple PHP Blog off the "CMS Focus" list.

Earlier this month, SilverStripe 2.1 was released.  The folks on the SilverStripe team appear pretty excited about this release, with just the right synergy brewing to give this CMS a good future.  Some of the new features and improvements in SilverStripe 2.1 include:

• New security system (benefiting from Google Summer of Code)
• Blog Module (with drag-n-drop widget support including tag clouds, RSS feed, etc)
• Support for Updated Gallery Module

Download links to SilverStripe 2.1 are available via SilverStripe.com.

Steven Peck, associated with the Drupal project, wrote about an article he came across regarding a comparison of the vBulletin forum and Drupal's forum. The article is titled, Goodbye vBulletin, Part 1: Reasons to Switch. The author of the article writes:

The aim of this article is not to poke holes, or say ‘vBulletin sucks’, but to provide constructive criticism of a successful product, proving that vBulletin is not always the best choice. In places the article compares vBulletin to Drupal, this is the platform The Webmaster Forums will be switching to and represents many of the things vBulletin should—in our humble opinion—aspire to.

Mr. Peck's reaction to the article (and my emphasis in bold):

Now this was a interesting. A well written article on why one site is switching over to use Drupal's built in forum rather then continue to use vbulletin.

In other words, Peck and many of us that pay attention to how the forum applications stack up against CMS native forums don't see too many articles like this. It is rare to see someone using a standard forum application such as vBulletin, SMF, or phpBB switch over to Drupal primarily for its forum functionality.