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".
Now here is the interesting and confusing part, just because Joomla has won the Best PHP Open Souce does not mean they'll be winning the Overall Winner category. How can this be if the same five open source CMS (CMS Made Simple, Drupal, e107, Joomla, and PHP-Fusion) that were selected as finalists in the Best PHP are also in the Overall Winner Category? Well my friends, each category has a different panel of judges that may approach CMS applications with a different perspective.
You'll note that all the judges on the Best PHP panel come from a PHP-centric background. However, the judges in the Overall Winner panel are less language specific and perhaps takes a more well-rounded information system approach to content management systems. In other words, CMS Made Simple, Drupal, e107, and PHP-Fusion could easily be announced on Friday as the winner in the Overall category. Then again, Joomla! seems to have the lucky magic when it comes to these type of competitions.