modx

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.

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.

MODx Web Development is a new book from Packt which will help users create a powerful, dynamic website by using the individual elements of MODx. Written by Antano Solar John this book is an example-driven tutorial, which will take readers from the installation of MODx through to configuration, customization, and deployment. It will enable them to build a fully-functional, feature-rich website quickly and without any programming language.

MODx is a content management system and PHP web application framework rolled into one. With the ease of a CMS and the extensibility of a framework, MODx allows you to develop professional-looking, intricate websites with its easy-to-use interface and flexible architecture. MODx provides reusable code called snippets most of which are so generic that, without any modification, they can serve multiple functionalities. The generic nature of the snippets makes it possible to get the perfect customization that is so hard in other content management systems.

This book will help readers change the look and feel of their site by creating their own templates using HTML, CSS, and widgets. Readers will learn a few core snippets such as Ditto and Way finder in detail. These powerful and flexible snippets will enable them to add multiple functionalities to their site.

With logical, and step-by-step instructions this book will show readers how to create their own unique site by adding and editing documents using the inbuilt TinyMCE editor. Beginner's as well as experienced web developers will benefit from this book. You can read more about this book here:

http://www.packtpub.com/modx-web-development/book