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Judging Five Overall Best Content Management Systems

Bryan's picture

This year, I had the privilege of participating as a member on the judging panel for Packt Publishing's Overall Best Open Source CMS Award. As I mentioned last month, WordPress was declared the winner of the award followed by MODx, SilverStripe, DotNetNuke, and finally XOOPS. Since the award announcement, I've had a lot of inquiries asking me how and in what order did I rank the content management systems. I decided to wait for a month before my posting my rankings of the Web applications because I wanted focus to remain on the declared winners and not my individual choices.

My rankings for the Overall Best Open Source CMS (with number one being the highest) were:

  1. WordPress
  2. DotNetNuke
  3. SilverStripe
  4. MODx
  5. XOOPS

Each of the judges on the panel, selects their top three CMS from the five included in this category. The judges are given a lot of reign for how they rank the CMS and may consider a number of factors such as performance, usability, accessibility, ease of configuration and customization, scalability and security. Despite the criteria given, the fact is the best CMS is the CMS you determine is best in meeting your project requirements. In other words, you may find that all five CMSes in this category meet your project needs or in some cases none of the given applications will meet your requirements. Despite how I ranked the CMS you still need to do your own homework before choosing what your "best" CMS.

WordPress leads the Packt as 2009 Overall Best Open Source CMS

Bryan's picture

After four years, WordPress has finally earned respect from the judges in Packt Publishing's 2009 Open Source CMS Award. WordPress has won the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award and is finally being recognized for its evolution from a blogging application to a full fledged Web content management system. Packt also declared MODx and SilverStripe tied for the first runner up position in this award.

We are pleased to announce that WordPress has won the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. WordPress has won this Award for the first time in the past four years, earning itself a place in the Hall of Fame category for the Award next year.

While WordPress occupied the top spot in the Overall Award, the other two extremely popular finalists MODx and SilverStripe tied for the first runner up position. After Pixie and Pligg sharing a similar result 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.

It is important to note that neither Drupal nor Joomla! competed in the Overall Best category as previous winners in this category compete in the Hall of Fame category. This year, Drupal out competed Joomla! in both the Hall of Fame category as well as the Best Open Source PHP CMS category. Joomla! may be out of luck this year but you surely can't count them out as the upcoming Joomla! 1.6 version should keep them competitive for next year. With three CMS now included in the Hall of Fame it should be an interesting rivalry between the three in 2010.

Some personal notes about the 2009 winners: As one of the judges for the Overall Best Open Source CMS, I too thought WordPress earned the spot for first place. However, I thought DotNetDuke should have been a runner up as I was impressed with it from a usability perspective. Similar to last year, I plan to eventually write a post of my review and the order in which I judged the CMS to be the best among the five finalists for this category. For now though, I don't want to take the spotlight away from either MODx or SilverStripe as the well deserved runner up winners.

Best Open Source non-PHP CMS: Plone Wins, followed by dotCMS and mojoPortal

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Packt Publishing announced today the winner of their 2009 Best Open Source Other CMS Award. Using the word "Other" is Packt's way of saying non-PHP content management system. For the second straight year the winner for Best Open Source Other CMS is Plone.

Since the introduction of this category in 2007, Plone has consistently featured among the top three, having won it in 2008. In another close contest, dotCMS had to settle for the first runner up position, finishing ahead of mojoPortal in the second runner spot.

So far, Packt has not given many details as to why the judges selected Plone over the remaining non-PHP finalists. I do know that last year, the judges praised "the ecosystem that is developing around Python and Zope is encouraging" for which supports Python. We'll add to this article if additional details are made public by Packt or the judges themselves. 

Perhaps there is very little surprise to also see dotCMS and mojoPortal listed within the the top three CMS in this category. However, I'm surprised that we don't see a mention of DotNetNuke as a winner in this category. In a recent review of DotNetNuke, I found the CMS to be much improved from previous years and doing a lot of the right things in the area of usability.

Update: Judge Stoyan Stefanov has posted his notes from his review of the five finalists in this categegory: http://www.phpied.com/open-source-cms-aw...

DotNetNuke Corp. Acquires Snowcovered

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SAN MATEO, Calif. – August 27, 2009DotNetNuke Corp. (http://bit.ly/8G1w) the most widely adopted framework for building web sites and web applications on Microsoft .NET., today announced the acquisition of Snowcovered, the premier online market for DotNetNuke modules, skins, services and related products. The union will create closer ties between the DotNetNuke platform and the Snowcovered online library of third party extensions which will enrich the DotNetNuke ecosystem and provide substantial business opportunities for independent software vendors and the users they serve.

News Highlights

  • The union between Snowcovered and DotNetNuke Corp. benefits the DotNetNuke commercial ecosystem by increasing access to a robust marketplace where users can access over 6,000 DotNetNuke framework extensions available for success. Snowcovered has successfully established substantial monthly web traffic to its site, driving demand for DotNetNuke modules and skins and providing DotNetNuke software ISVs with visibility and business opportunities.
  • As a subsidiary of DotNetNuke Corp., the Snowcovered business model will remain the same, allowing independent software vendors to post, sell, and support their software extensions online.

DottNetNuke 5.1 offers new features and enhancements

Bryan's picture

Last week, DotNetNuke Corp. announced the availability of DotNetNuke Professional Edition 5.1. This edition is the latest release of its web content management and application development framework for business-critical websites and web applications built on Microsoft .NET. The DotNetNuke Professional Edition is built on the same open source core as the free DotNetNuke Community Edition but includes several exclusive features and is fully supported and documented. The annual DotNetNuke Professional Edition subscription costs $1,999 per instance.

New features added to both the community and professional editions of DotNetNuke 5.1 include:

  • Added Management Console to simplify access to admin functions
  • Auditing for core tables to increase security
  • Content Approval and Versioning
  • Stop banners displaying and clickthrough count incrementing when indexed by crawlers
  • Skin Event Handling
  • Google Analytics Support
  • Custom XML Sitemap Ranks

Besides the new features and normal bug fixes, DotNetNuke 5.1 also offers additional improvements over DotNetNuke 5.0 including:

DotNetNuke Moves to CodePlex

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Seattle (PRWEB) January 7, 2009 -- DotNetNuke® Corporation, the creators of the industry-leading DotNetNuke development framework, today announced a deeper collaboration with CodePlex, Microsoft's premier open source project hosting website. Beginning with the DotNetNuke 4.9.1 and 5.0.0 product releases, DotNetNuke is now leveraging CodePlex's expansive infrastructure for its core product distribution.

In past collaboration with CodePlex, DotNetNuke Corporation announced the availability of the DotNetNuke Forge in February 2008. The DotNetNuke Forge is a premier destination for open source collaboration on the DotNetNuke platform. The DotNetNuke Forge has grown in breadth and popularity over the past year and now represents a vital part of the DotNetNuke ecosystem.

Over the past year we have witnessed CodePlex's strong commitment to open source projects on the Microsoft platform. We are excited to welcome DotNetNuke to the CodePlex community.

As the leading open source web application framework for ASP.NET, we're looking forward to partnering with them to promote open source development on the Microsoft platform. We're also looking forward to hearing the feedback from the DotNetNuke community for improving the open source development experience on CodePlex.

Commenting on several popular CMS

Bryan's picture

Editor's Note: There have been moments here at CMS Report when I am amazed with the insightful and in depth comments written by some of our readers. This is one of those moments. Chris Jewitt, left us a comment regarding several popular content management systems (CMS).  The CMS mentioned in this brief review are Joomla!, Wordpress, Dotnetnuke, Plone, Drupal, Alfresco, and Sharepoint.

I moved Chris Jewitt's comments have been moved to the "front page" so the story isn't missed by those visiting this site.  Any hyperlinks found in this story have been added by the editor.

Below Submitted by Chris Jewitt on December 4, 2008 - 1:42am.  

Kudos to Mike Heck for a high level comparison of the top 5 open source content management systems. Personally I find it difficult to scrutinize any community (geeky or not) that has contributed for the # of years and volume these communities have. As Amy so eloquently mentioned, if you don't like something then contribute - make a difference.

I have to also say, I have often found myself left empty when trying to find a good objective, deep-dive opinions and analysis of these web content management systems. I think the only true "content management system" is Alfresco in this comparison. It seems the strength of the others are web content management.

I've spent the last 6 years working in commercial content management and portal systems. Lately I've been investigating open source solutions and started down the Drupal path; however, I still waffle over Plone. For what it's worth, here's my reasoning or two cents: