Packt Awards: Most Promising Open Source Project Award

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 Open Source Awards

The Open Source Awards was started five-years ago by Packt Publishing to support the open source software community. In addition to recognition, the top recipient in each category receives US$ 2,500.

Packt’s award continues to grow in popularity. The contest originally focused exclusively on web content management systems. It has since broadened to encompass more categories including:

Open Source CMS
Hall of Fame CMS
Most Promising Open Source Project
Open Source E-Commerce Applications
Open Source JavaScript Libraries
Open Source Graphics Software

The public nominates projects in six categories. The five projects with the most nominations in each category become finalists, and then a panel of independent industry judges selects the winner and two runners up using a set of predefined criteria.

Showing Promise

The Most Promising Project category recognizes the up-and-coming projects that have demonstrated innovation and potential over the last twelve months. This category is really about providing recognition to relatively new projects that have a big potential to make positive changes in the market. This year’s finalists are:

Winners from previous years are available on Packt’s site.

So who pulled out in front of the competition to win the award? Web CMS newcomer Pimcore has prevailed.

The project only started slightly over a year ago. Pimcore is PHP Web CMS that uses the Zend framework. In addition to managing content, the product also allows users to perform product information management and asset management from a single tool.

Pimcore user interface

Winning the award will provide Pimcore with increased visibility to the public; this is definitely a plus given the increasingly competitive Web CMS market.

Packt Awards Announcement Schedule

Each day this week, Packt announces a new category. The schedule of announcements is:

Tuesday 16 November: Open Source E-Commerce Applications category
Wednesday 17 November: Open Source Graphics Software category
Thursday 18 November: Open Source JavaScript Libraries category
Friday 19 November: Open Source CMS and Hall of Fame CMS categories

Keep your eyes on CMSWire to stay up to date.