Packt News & Articles

Packt Publishing (news, site) announced that it has donated over US$ 300,000 to open source projects. The technical book publisher has provided financial support to open source projects since 2004, long before open source gained its current favored position in the enterprise.

Packt Publishing (news, site) has released the names of the next set of winners in its annual Open Source Awards. This round includes the winner of the Open Source E-Commerce Applications category and the Open Source Graphics Software category. Packt will announce winners for the remaining three categories later this week.

Packt, UK publishers of technical books, has begun announcing the winners of the 2010 Open Source Awards, a five-year-old event held online annually by Packt Publishing (news, site) to recognize and reward Open Source projects. Each day this week, Packt will announce a new category; today they disclosed the winner of the Most Promising Open Source Project.

The 2010 Packt Awards (news, site) are looming, who are you going to vote for?

It's that time again. Packt Publishing (news, site) has launched their fifth annual awards, but they've changed things up a bit this year.

It is probably appropriate that a little less than two months after Oracle (news, site) released its Enterprise Content Management Suite 11g, Dmitri Khanine, who publishes the Independent Oracle UCM Knowledge Center, has just released a new book that promises a whirlwind tour of the Oracle Universal Content Management (UCM) component of the suite.

CMS Made Simple 1.6: Beginner's Guide, authored by Sofia Hauschildt and published by Packt, is a new book that newcomers can use to create professional-looking websites.

Packt Publishing (news, site), one of our favorite providers of IT books for professionals, has just kicked out a book to help you boost Drupal 6 performance.

The book is aimed at users of all experience levels--that includes you, beginners!--as well as, designers, themers and webmasters.

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."

This week Packt (news, site) is announcing one new award winner a day. Already they've revealed that:

• Plone (news, site) won 2009 Best Other Open Source CMS
• Drupal (news, site) won Best Open Source PHP CMS
• ImpressCMS (news, site) won 2009 Most Promising Open Source CMS

Today's category is the 2009 Open Source CMS Hall of Fame. Starting with 2009, Best Overall Open Source CMS winners are no longer eligible to win this category (though Packt has not definitively stated whether this policy is just for this year or indefinitely).

Instead, all previous Best Overall winners (Joomla! in 2006, and Drupal in 2007 and 2008) now compete in the Hall of Fame category.

Speaking of winners, the winner of the first inaugural Packt Hall of Fame Award is Drupal. The Drupal project receives a prize of US$ 4,000 with this win. Second place is (obviously) Joomla!, which receives US$ 2,000.

In addition to this main award, there are two new separate specialty sub-awards:

• The Drupal Award, given to Zen for the Best Drupal Theme, and Views for the Best Drupal Module
• The Joomla! Award, given to Affinity for the best Joomla! theme, and noixACL for Best Joomla! extension

Tomorrow Packt announces the final prize, that of 2009 Best Overall Open Source CMS.

This week Packt (news, site) is announcing one new award winner a day. Already they've revealed that Plone (news, site) won 2009 Best Other Open Source CMS, and Drupal (news, site) won Best Open Source PHP CMS.

Today's category is for the 2009 Most Promising Open Source CMS. Congratulations to the winner, ImpressCMS (news, site), and runners up Pixie (news, site) and Pligg (news, site). Still to come are the Hall of Fame winner on November 12, and the Best Overall Open Source CMS on November 13. The winner of this category receives $2,000 and both runners up receive $1,000 each.

The Packt award is really more of a popularity contest than a statement of fitness for a particular purpose, but it can serve to indicate where there is growing or waning energy around various open source projects. For a analysis of the top 20 most popular open source CMS, see the free 2009 Open Source Market Share report.

Now in its fourth year, the Packt Awards offer US$ 24,000 in prizes to the projects deemed "best" in their particular open source content management class.

Categories this year include a new Hall of Fame award alongside the usual titles of:

• Best Overall Open Source CMS
• Most Promising Open Source CMS
• Best PHP Open Source CMS
• Best Other Open Source CMS
• Open Source MVPs

The Hall of Fame award is for previous winners of the Overall award and is an attempt to open up that category for more nominees and not just the usual suspects.

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.]

Three cheers for Jeff Potts! The author of Alfresco Developer Guide took home Packt’s (news, site) Author of the Year award along with a cool US$ 1000 cash prize earlier this month. Not bad for a guy’s first published book, right?

“I am excited and honored to win the award,” said Potts, “especially because I know there were several popular and well-written books among the finalists.”

The finalists included 5 other nominated titles:

Drupal Multimedia by Aaron Winborn
Learning Drupal 6 Module Development by Matt Butcher
Learning Ext JS by Shea Fredrick, Colin Ramsay and Steve "Cutter" Blades
Object-Oriented JavaScript by Stoyan Stefanov
Service Oriented Architecture with Java by Vincenzo Caselli, Binildas A. Christudas and Malhar Barai

Judges praised Potts’ book in particular for “providing a strong balance of background, actionable items, and wisdom” and bringing a complex, challenging topic “down to earth”.

“Most of our authors write in their limited free time alongside demanding full time jobs and this award gives us another, more fun way to reward and thank our authors,” said David Barnes, Packt Acquisition Editor and organizer of the award.

Inspired? Check out Potts’ book here.

Now in its fourth year, the Packt Awards (news, site)  offer US$ 24,000 in prizes to the best in open source content management software. Will Drupal walk off with the gold again? Or will Joomla or DotNetNuke steal the crown?

It's been a long, difficult journey for the Joomla! (news, site) web content management community. Born from a project fork of the Mambo CMS, and with strong early ambitions, Joomla! has struggled at times with its place in the open source landscape, and with the ideas of what is best for both the project and the community.

Between license issues and striving toward a more open, welcoming process, the Joomla! community has had their work cut out for them. Along the way they've made mistakes, but they've also made a popular and powerful open source content management system that promises to only get better in the years to come.

We spent some time talking with various community members and piecing together the project history and current status. Here's the state of the project as we see it.