Packtpub Awards News & Articles

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.]

SilverStripe (news, link) has expanded -- via a new partner program -- from its corporate headquarters in Wellington, New Zealand, into partnerships that take them into eight locations throughout the US, Europe and Australia.

Their new partner network allows business to get local (or at least more local) professional SilverStripe support and services, and will raise the general awareness of this up and coming open source content management system.

Perhaps most well known for powering the US Democratic Party's National Convention website, streaming live speeches by Barak Obama and serving 3.2 billion pageviews over 96 hours, SilverStripe was also the winner of the 2008 Packtpub Open Source CMS awards in the Most Promising CMS category. SilverStripe also recently became only the second vendor that is an official Mollom partner.

CEO Brian Calhoun says of this announcement, "This is the most exciting and ambitious expansion plan in the company's history. Two years ago we opened up our licensing from a proprietary to an open source model. That has gone significantly better than we anticipated ... The Partner Program comes strictly out of demand; we had people knocking on our doors telling us that they wanted to be our international partners."

Visit the SilverStripe Partners page for the location of the SilverStripe partner closest to you. And stay tuned to CMSWire today, as SilverStripe is competing in the CMS Idol competition this afternoon at the J Boye Conference in Philadelphia. We'll aim to bring you the results in a timely fashion.

This one goes out to all the ImpressCMS lovers out there. The increasingly popular content management system has been updated in order to address several issues discovered with the last major release, in addition to offering a few improvements.

On the eve of their third place standing in the 2008 Most Promising Open Source CMS category of the PacktPub’s 2008 Awards, ImpressCMS has released their version 1.1 final. As a fairly new open source Web CMS, ImpressCMS is showing great promise for the future… and the new version contains a large amount of changes and upgrades that were community suggestions as well as bug fixes. Next year, they just might make the Overall Best CMS category.