Yesterday, Packt Publishing announced the finalists for their 2011 Open Source Award.   This announcement signals the start of the next stage where the finalists are now open to public vote, which lasts until October 31.

Not all the categories in the award are content management related, but if you have an interest in open source I think you'll find each one of the finalists have a great story to tell. The finalists, listed in alphabetical order across all the categories, are as follows:

Open Source CMS Award

• Drupal
• Joomla!
• mojoPortal
• Plone
• SilverStripe

Open Source Business Applications

• Magento
• NopCommerce
• OpenCart
• PrestaShop
• SugarCRM

Most Promising Open Source Project

• Chamilo
• FLOW3
• ImpressPages
• Nette Framework
• Seo Panel

Open Source Mobile Toolkits and Libraries

• FoneMonkey
• jQuery Mobile
• Min3D
• PhoneGap
• Sencha Touch

Open Source JavaScript Libraries

• Dojo Toolkit
• jQuery
• Raphael JS
• Sencha- ExtJS
• YUI Library

Open Source Graphics Software

• Airtime
• Blender
• GIMP
• Inkscape
• Krita

Users are invited to vote for their favorite open source projects across all the applicable categories and maximize their chances of winning their share of $24,000. Public votes will be combined with ratings from a panel of Judges with the winners announced on November 7.

In other Awards news, Packt has introduced subcategories to the 2011 Open Source Awards finals for the CMS and JavaScript Library categories. To read more, click here.

Packt is delighted to announce Moodle JavaScript Cookbook, a collection of over 50 step by step recipes to enhance Moodle with JavaScript and the Yahoo! User Interface Library. Written by Alastair Hole, author of award-winning Moodle repository plugin- MrCUTE, the book explores a wide range of modern interactive features, from AJAX to Animation to create more dynamic and responsive Moodle systems.

Moodle is a free source e-learning software platform. It has become very popular among educators around the world as a tool for creating online dynamic web sites for their students. Its open source license and modular design allows any developer to create additional modules and features.

Moodle JavaScript Cookbook starts off by explaining the basics of combining Moodle with JavaScript and its various libraries. It then shows readers how to integrate Yahoo! User Interface Library with Moodle and will be the main focus throughout the book. Readers will also learn how to add validation features to their Moodle forms, retrieve and process data from external sites in a range of formats using AJAX.

Last fall, I once again had the privilege of participating as a member of the judging panel for Packt Publishing's Open Source Awards. For the 2010 event, I participated by voting for the category of Open Source CMS Awards. In that award, the winner was declared by the panel to be CMS Made Simple, with SilverStripe as first runner up followed by MODx as second runner up.

I received a lot of inquiries asking me how and in what order did I rank the content management systems. Each of the judges on the panel, selects and ranks 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 including performance, usability, size and support from community, accessibility, ease of configuration, customization, scalability and security.

It has been my history to be transparent to all with how I rank each CMS as my vote will have some differences to those of the panel. This time around, I find myself hesitant and under personal protest with me providing information on how I ranked the five content management systems.

I question whether we're doing any good by declaring one CMS as better than another CMS. Dean Barker discussed on his blog some time ago this same uneasy feeling you get when you judge a CMS without having some reference to real world requirements. None of these content management systems would I consider losers and all of them remain worthy of future consideration. Yet, I'm disturbed that people will look at the numbers and interpret the results in a ways I never intended my rankings to be used.

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

1. SilverStripe
2. mojoPortal
3. MODx
4. XOOPS and CMS Made Simple (Tie)

I'm not a firm believer in ties when it comes to ranking content management systems. Yet, this year I did just that for XOOPS and CMS Made Simple. All five content management systems that were reviewed I would consider as a candidate for a future project. None of the CMS would I consider a "last place" CMS so I refused to do so. It is also important to note that neither Drupal, Joomla!, or WordPress competed in this ranking as previous winners in this category duke it out in the Hall of Fame category.

CMS Made Simple is the winner in Packt Publishing's Open Source CMS Award category of the 2010 Open Source Awards. CMS Made Simple has won this Award for the first time in the past five years, having been a presence in the Award since 2007. Packt also announced  SilverStripe as first runner up with MODx in the second runners up position.

I had the privilege of sitting as a judge in this year's Open Source CMS Award category. My vote was a little different from the official award ranking where I would have placed mojoPortal, another 2010 award finalist, in a runnerup position.  I may have been the only judge that may have ranked mojoPortal in the top three positions. As I've done similarly in past years, in the near future I'll post how I judged the finalists in this category. However, it is now CMS Made Simple's well deserved moment and I won't take the spotlight away from them with my personal ramblings.

Attached below is the official press release I received from Packt Publishing announcing CMS Made Simple as the winner of the Open Source CMS Award. Congratulations to all those involved int he development and support of this great open source CMS.

Packt Publishing announce that jQuery has won its Open Source JavaScript Libraries Award category in the 2010 Open Source Awards. The Award is a new category introduced to the Open Source Awards this year, featuring libraries of pre-written JavaScript controls which allow for easier development of RIAs (Rich Internet Applications), visually enhanced applications or smoother server-side JavaScript functionalities.

"On behalf of the entire jQuery Team, let me first say thanks to Packt Publishing for this award. I'd also like to give a huge thanks to the community of designers and developers that use jQuery daily and felt the urge to vote for jQuery as their favorite JavaScript library.  We'll use this prize to further the development of the jQuery Project." Said Ralph Whitbeck, jQuery core team member.

“While jQuery hasn't undergone any radical change in the past year, the project has continued to evolve at the same frenetic pace and the 1.4 release included a wide range of small but important improvements.” Added Michael Mahemoff, Google developer advocate, HTML5/JavaScript specialist and one of the judges for the 2010 Open Source JavaScript Libraries category. “jQuery covers all bases as its performance is high priority, it is easy to use, has a huge community, great documentation, and an excellent plugin ecosystem.”

While jQuery occupied the top spot in the 2010 Open Source JavaScript Libraries category, the other two extremely popular finalists Raphaël and Mootools tied and both projects will be awarded the first runner up position.

For detailed results on each category and more information about the Award, please visit: https://www.packtpub.com/open-source-awards-home.