ImpressCMS

Half a year ago, I posted a video previewing the upcoming release of ImpressCMS 1.2. Unknown to me at the time was that it would take another six months before the content management system was to become finally released. According to the project developers, it's actually been 14 months since the release of ImpressCMS 1.1.

Almost 14 months in the making, ImpressCMS 1.2 is now ready as a Final release! ImpressCMS 1.1 was released at the end of October 2008 and the scope of changes in this release has kept the developers, testers and translators busy.

ImpressCMS has had a short, but notable history - founded in 2007, an initial release in January 2008, 3rd place in Packt Publishing's Most Promising Open Source CMS in 2008 and 1st place in 2009, a 2008 finalist in SourceForge's Community Choice Awards, 32 separate releases and almost 10,000 commits in its code repository.

Some of the new features and improvements in ImpressCMS 1.2 include:

• Imagemanager, with online editing
• Fully customizable Profile module, with social networking features
• Content module

Packt Publishing announced that ImpressCMS has won the Most Promising Open Source CMS category in their 2009 Open Source CMS Award.

While ImpressCMS took first place in this category, Pixie and Pligg weren’t far behind and settled for a tie in the first runner up spot.

ImpressCMS has featured in the top three in this category for the second time in a row, and has lived up to its reputation this year by winning the top spot.

Pixie and Pligg, on the other hand, featured in this category for the first time and managed to impress a lot of judges with their quality and support.

The "Most Promising" category is my favorite of all the categories in Packt's open source CMS award system. The CMSs in this category are lesser known applications requiring the judges on the panel to do a lot more homework than usual and sometimes coming up with some surprises in their analysis. This category is Packt's biggest contribution for getting lesser known open source CMSs the exposure they most likely deserve.

Last year, I had the honor of judging the Most Promising category and was pleased to see SilverStripe get the nod from this award. In 2008, ImpressCMS was also evaluated for this category and left me with a positive impression.

Yes, it's that time of year again. Packt Publishing recently announced the five finalists in each of the categories of its 2009 Open Source CMS Award. The Voting for the winners in each of the five 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.

This year, I will be participating as a judge for the Overall Open Source CMS Award. 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. I'm especially excited to be working with Deane Barker, a fellow Sioux Falls resident. Over the years, Deane and I have had some great discussions on content management systems. It will be interesting to find out whether we will be agreeing with each other or not on which CMS should be considered the top CMS for the Overall category.

Previous winners in the Overall category have included Drupal (2007, 2008) and  Joomla! (2006) as the overall winner. Previous winners of the Overall category are not eligible for the Overall category in 2009 as Packt Publishing apparently wanted to prevent the Overall category of being dominated by past winners. The good news is that both Drupal and Joomla are eligible to compete in the new Hall of Fame category and are also finalists in the Best Open Source PHP CMS category.

A video tour of the new features of ImpressCMS has been produce so you can see what is coming in the next release found via ImpressCMS.org.

ImpressCMS 1.1.2 was released over the weekend.  Improvements and new additions to ImpressCMS since 1.1.1 was released include:

• SMARTY was updated to the latest version - 2.6.22
• Password encryption method can only be changed if the site is open and allows you to access the reset password page
• Database factory improvement providing more protection against SQL injections when Protector 3.30+ is installed
• SimplePie RSS generator
• Updated HTMLPurifier Library from 3.2.0 to 3.3.0

New users should download the latest full version, users who already have a XOOPS or ImpressCMS site should get the latest upgrade packages.  More details can be found at the project's Website.

I caused a little bit of controversy during my review of ImpressCMS as one of the five most promising CMS.

ImpressCMS impressed me so much that I decided to add it to CMS Report's CMS Focus.  ImpressCMS pushed XOOPS off of this list!

Some of the XOOPS fans thought I was being too harsh on XOOPS by knocking it off my top 30 list.  When I took a look at ImpressCMS (a fork of XOOPS) I was impressed with some of the new directions the project has taken since its departure from XOOPS.  I knew I wanted to put ImpressCMS on my top 30 CMS list, but in order to put one into CMS Focus I have to take another CMS off the list.  I choose to take XOOPS of the list.

After some discussion with "mamba", I have realized that I may have been premature in taking XOOPS out my top 30 list.  So as of today, XOOPS is back on the list.  Putting XOOPS on the list bumps off Dragonfly from CMS Focus.