Modx News & Articles

This week Packt (news, site) has announced one winner a day for its 2009 Open Source CMS awards. Already they've revealed that:

• Plone (news, site) won 2009 Best Other Open Source CMS
• Drupal (news, site) won 2009 Best Open Source PHP CMS and the first inaugural 2009 Hall of Fame award
• ImpressCMS (news, site) won 2009 Most Promising Open Source CMS

Today's category is the last: 2009 Overall Best Open Source CMS.

Congratulations to WordPress (news, site) for taking home the crown. Tied for runners up are MODx (news, site) and SilverStripe (news, site).

The WordPress project receives US$ 4,000 in prize money, while MODx and SilverStripe each receive US$ 2,500. In addition to the money, WordPress also becomes eligible for the Hall of Fame category next year.

In the winners' announcement, Packt Publishing stated that, "After Pixie and Pligg [tied for runners up] for the Most Promising CMS category, this is the second time the combined opinion of judges and the public was evenly divided for two CMSes, awarding each of them a first runner up spot."

It's that time again -- Packt (news, site) is announcing the winners of its Open Source CMS Awards. The lucky ones are narrowed down via community voting, and then judges make the final evaluations. Throughout this week we'll find out who won in each of the 4 categories:

1. Best Other Open Source CMS -- Congrats to the Plone (news, site) project for retaining last year's title!
2. Best Open Source PHP CMS -- Congrats to Drupal who's win was announced this morning.
3. Most Promising Open Source CMS -- Coming November 11, 2009.
4. Best Overall Open Source CMS -- Coming November 13, 2009.

Runners up for 2009's Best Other Open Source CMS are dotCMS (news, site) and mojoPortal (news, site). The winning projects receive prize money as well, $2000 to Plone and $500 each for dotCMS and mojoPortal. Previous winners for this category include Plone's 2008 win and mojoPortal in 2007.

Those who made Packt's 2009 Open Source CMS Most Valued People list were also announced. the list includes:

• Robert Campbell for CMS Made Simple (news, site) 
• Dries Buytaert for Drupal (news, site) 
• Louis Landry for Joomla! (news, site) 
• Ryan thrash for MODx (news, site) 
• Joe Audette for mojoPortal (news, site) 
• Kasper Skaarhoj for TYPO3 (news, site) 
• Leo Feyer for TYPOlight (news, site) 
• Taiwen Jiang for XOOPS (news, site) 

List members were nominated by the developers and community of each project.

[Editor's Note: Check out our 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share report for details on the 20 most popular open source content management systems.]

In the wake of the 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share report's listing MODx (news, site) as one of the open source content management systems gathering strength, the folks at MODx are keeping the momentum going -- here are two fresh releases singing that tune.

On Friday we announced the release of the second annual 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share Report. The project was a collaboration with water & stone, an APAC-based interactive agency. The initial announcement addressed what the report covers, its purpose and some key highlights.

For the sake of disclosure, while I did look over the preliminary survey and advise on some tweaks, I otherwise wasn't involved in this report and am looking at this data with fresh eyes and no particular bias from the side of CMSWire.

Now let's take a look more in depth.

Following on the heels of the 2008 Open Source CMS Market Share Report, this year we collaborated with water&stone to produce an improved 2009 version. The report is an interesting study of 20 dominant systems in the market. It's really not about which CMS is best, nor about relative comparisons beyond brand strength, sentiment and adoption patterns. We're aware of this.

Traditional and Social Media Analysis

What the study did was sniff around the nooks and crannies of our increasingly electronic and publicly broadcast lives and endeavor to quantify the relative brand strengths, brand sentiments and adoption patterns for the top 20 most popular content management products. In addition, we ran a survey on CMSWire.com a little ways back. With this tool we were able to directly pose questions to our readership -- and more than 1200 of you took to the task (thank you!).

This year's analysis looked at Alfresco, CMS Made Simple, DotNetNuke, Drupal, e107, eZ Publish, Jahia, Joomla, Liferay, MODx, OpenCms, phpWebSite, Plone, SilverStripe, Textpattern, TikiWiki, Typo3, Umbraco and WordPress.

Key Conclusions: 3 Dominate, Many Are Vibrant

What jumped quickly out is that The Big Three -- Joomla, WordPress and Drupal -- led the survey set across a wide range of measures. However, the top slots are not static, Joomla has gained market share over Drupal, and WordPress with its hosted version has what looks like a smoother path to adoption.

The report identifies less obvious stars. Alfresco, a vendor focused on both document management and web content management, performed well across a number of categories, and led the Java-based open source CMS race over its nearest rival, Liferay. DotNetNuke led the .NET-based open source CMS category, though Umbraco is up and coming.

The report goes on to identify reasons why DotNetNuke's position may soon be changing. In addition to naming the market leaders, the study identifies projects whose market share and brand metrics indicate they are at risk or facing a closing window of opportunity. A metric we found of particular interest was the product evaluation rates versus the adoption rates.

The 90+ page report is available for free and includes profiles of each of the systems covered.

Only a month after Injader released v2.3.2 of its web content management system, it has upgraded by almost a full point with release v2.4. This latest release comes with a couple of major improvements and assorted changes to the earlier version.

Originally created in 2005, under the name Majestic, to upgrade websites that were being coded by hand, the self professed goal of Injader is to create a system that enables everyone to build their own website.

Currently available for download at SourceForge, it dispenses with what its creator Ben Barden describes as ‘flashy’ technologies and offers sites that are not only easy to use for the owner, but for their public as well.

It's been a long time coming, but after all the talk over the past few months the latest version of MODx 1.0 (news, site), or at least the latest version of MODx Evolution 1.0, open source web content management system, is here.

Don't confuse it with MODx Revolution, which according to the MODx blog, will be released later this year. This week’s release is the final version of Evolution 1.0, which was unveiled in mid-June as a Release Candidate (RC), and which finally updates the non-English language files that are the principal difference between this version and the RC.

One can get a little confused when a vendor has a few different names for their solution. MODx (news, site), an open source web content management system, is one of these that, if you aren't really familiar with the product and grown with it, you might not fully understand why they have two different names for MODx: Evolution and Revolution.

Let's have a look at the difference between the two and talk about the latest Release Candidate for MODx Evolution.

We talked about the big changes coming for MODx (news, site) earlier this year and now we are seeing those changes come to fruition. Beta 1 of the new MODx Revolution 2.0 is ready to download and test and there are some major changes in this open source web content management system.

In December 2008 the MODx team announced an upgrade featuring several key fixes and the usual security updates. This upgrade to v0.9.6.3 is touted as the final release of the initial incarnation of the MODx CMS development framework.

What this means is MODx may be close to releasing a version with a whole number. A large batch of dedicated MODx users eagerly await this development. Will it happen in ‘09?

On the homepage of MODx, amongst an unusual but welcome absence of pseudo-corporate gibberish, lies a strange adducement. The system is, we are told, “100% buzzword compliant”.

I can think of better ways I would like my product to be regarded, but now the organization has a genuinely impressive claim for their product: they have just won Packt Publishing’s “Most Promising Open Source CMS” award, beating off strong competition from Typolight and dotCMS, amongst others, to secure the title.

If open source truly is the future, and these guys are the future of open source, then the news will make a lot of Web CMS industry people sit up and take notice.

Commerce and Kiwis are two wonderful things that just aren’t paired together often enough. ITema, Inc. has thankfully addressed this issue, at least in name, by releasing to the open source community KiweeCommerce, an e-commerce module for the MODx content management system.