competition

Allen Ellis: Why the Packt CMS Competition is Broken, and How to Fix It

By ocproducts - Posted on 28 October 2009

By now, many of us are excited to see the finalists for this year's Packt Publishing Open Source CMS (Content Management System) Award competition, the annual contest in which dozens of companies compete to be highlighted as the year's finest Content Management System.

Entering its fourth year, this competition has grown nearly five-fold and is widely regarded as the most prestigious award available in the CMS industry. But as successful as the competition has become, it sadly suffers from inherent issues which prevent it from truly presenting today's gamut of CMS choices in a valuable way.

Here is the reason: to even be considered as a finalist in the competition, each CMS is judged on exactly one condition: community vote counts. Granted, this can be a valid measure of a CMS's success, however today's CMS environment is very polarized. We see large majorities of people using Drupal, Joomla, and Wordpress, often simply because those are the CMSs in the headlines.

As a result, these CMSs are naturally going to have far more votes in every competition - they are votes from people who already use these CMSs and who rarely branch out to explore alternatives. This self-fulfilling cycle ensures that these few CMSs continue to dominate our headlines, simply because they were the early winners and can rely on their present install-base for votes, rather than relying on the merits, features, and usability of their own systems in comparison with other CMSs.

Drupal is a finalist in Best Open Source PHP CMS Award

By Bryan - Posted on 22 September 2009

Yes Drupal fans, it's that time of year again. Packt Publishing recently announced the finalists in each of the categories of its 2009 Open Source CMS Award. Drupal is one of the five finalists in the award category, Best Open Source PHP CMS.

Best Open Source PHP CMS Finalists:

Drupal is also included in the Hall of Fame which is a new category for the Packt award and intended for past winners of the Overall category. Previous winners in the Overall category include Drupal (2007, 2008) and Joomla! (2006). Why the Hall of Fame? Previous winners of the Overall category are not eligible for the Overall category in 2009 as Packt Publishing apparently wants to prevent the Overall category from being dominated by Drupal past winners. So this year, Drupal has a chance to finally put the smackdown on Joomla!.

As a side note, this year I will be participating as a judge for the Overall Open Source CMS Award. Similar to last year, I asked Packt Publishing to place me on a judging panel that did not include Drupal due to my well-known bias for favoring Drupal. This year, I have the honor of sharing the judging panel with John Resig of jQuery fame, Deane Barker of Gadgetopia and Blend Interactive, and Karen Coombs from Web Services at the University of Houston Libraries.

The Voting for the winners in each of Packt's categories ends on October 30, 2009. This "public vote" will then be combined with votes by a panel of judges with the top three CMS and overall winners in each category to be announced on November 9, 2009.

Get out the Vote: 2009 Open Source CMS Award

By Bryan - Posted on 19 August 2009

There are is only about three weeks a day or two left to nominate your favorite open source content management system for Packt Publishing's 2009 Open Source CMS Award. This is the fourth year for the award and the third time I will be sitting on a judging panel for the award.

This award is often seen as a competition between open source CMS projects, however, I view the award as an opportunity to promote open source and content management to the masses. I also know many in the content management field that use these type of awards to help them decide which open source CMS projects should be on their radar too. While the winning open source projects do enjoy winning their share of the $24,000 in award money, I think the projects are more appreciative just knowing their users thought enough of their CMS to nominate them in the first place.

Is your site hot or not?

By Bryan - Posted on 01 February 2008

First, there was HOT or NOT where you could rate the pictures of men and women. A great site to visit if you're single and don't have a date on a lonely Friday night. But life changes and now you have a family. Do what do you do if you're married with nothing to do on a Saturday night?

Yes, you can always watch Curious George with the family, but how do you get back to your old life in a responsible manner? Well, now you have an alternative, Web Hot or Not?

David Sifry (Technorati) explains how webhotornot.com came to exist.

How did it come to exist? When I was in Madrid visiting my friend and investor Martin Varsavsky late last year, we had a fun time brainstorming ideas to help find and rate interesting web sites, and we came up with the idea. Who knows, perhaps the ratings might even be useful if people start using the site - sort of a "prediction market" for web sites. Most of all, we just wanted to create a simple site that was fast-loading and fun to use. We both love Hotornot, so we figured we'd do an homage.

Netlog showdown showing U.S. needs more than language lessons

By Bryan - Posted on 06 November 2007

The November 1st issue of the Wall Street Journal has an interesting article regarding Netlog.com (formerly Facebox). The article is titled, "How Netlog Leaps Language Barriers".

The article focuses on the diversity challenges that social networking sites have in Europe with Europeans speaking more than a dozen languages. Netlog appears to have stepped up to the cultural diversity challenge and is doing so at a much lower investment cost than its rivals. Netlog's secret weapons: the use of open source tools (apparently the site runs on PHP, MySQL, Ajax, etc.) as well as an army of foreign students at a nearby Belgian university.

By relying on some clever technology and a ready supply of foreign students at a nearby university, Netlog has become a veritable Tower of Babel. It counts 28 million members and has versions in 13 different languages, including French, German and Italian, as well less common tongues like Romanian and Norwegian. Polish and Russian versions are nearly finished and another dozen languages, including Catalan, Estonian and Arabic, are on the way.

That is a notable achievement, because outside of North America, many Internet start-ups are hemmed in by linguistic barriers that limit their ability to attract users and generate revenue.

I applaud Netlog's forward-thinking to build from the ground-up a multi-language content/social management system. More interesting is that while Netlog's developers understood what was at stake, the much larger U.S. social networking sites have been hampered by not thinking on more global terms.

Joomla! voted best PHP Open Source CMS

By rowanw@drupal.org - Posted on 31 October 2007

Packt have awarded Joomla! $2000 for receiving the highest number of votes for 'Best PHP Open Source CMS', surpassing Drupal and e107 who came second and third, respectively.

The judges for this roundup noted Joomla!'s "good front-end for administrators and end-users" as well as the large community that supports the Joomla! project.

Last year Joomla! was the winner of the same (albeit modified) competition in which the CMS was awarded $5000.

Packt still has two more cash prizes to give away over the next two days for the 'Most Promising Open Source CMS' and 'Overall Winner'. However, considering the nominees for Overall Winner and Best PHP Open Source CMS are identical, the final results should come as no surprise.

Source: http://www.packtpub.com/award

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Did you nominate your favorite Open Source CMS at Packt Publishing?

By Bryan - Posted on 19 August 2007

As I mentioned last month, Packt Publishing is currently taking nominations for their Open Source Content Management Systems Award. Nominations are scheduled to close on August 31, 2007. With the deadline less then two weeks away, there is no better time then the present to head over to their site and promote your favorite open source CMS. Nominations are being accepted for each of the below categories (click to nominate):

Packt publishing has also set aside a total of $20,000 in award money to be dispersed among the winners...so this isn't only a chance to for the open source projects to get some recognition but also a chance for the projects and their community to earn a little bit of cash.