Sometimes it only takes the right soundtrack for a tutorial on a Web content management system to get your attention. This six and a half minute tutorial on how to set up a website with Php-Fusion is one of them.

Yesterday, PHP-Fusion announced that someone had hacked into their site and changed the download link for PHP-Fusion Version 7.

Hello all,

We had an issue a few days ago where a malicious person gained
access to our site as a super administrator via a weak account/gained
password. They apparently changed the download link of PHP-Fusion
version 7 to spendspace and it was packaged as a .rar file.

If you downloaded one of these files, please reinstall your entire site using a fresh copy from SourceForge.

While this isn't a good thing, it is a positive that PHP-Fusion disclosed the possibility that the link led to a version of PHP-Fusion that may have been maliciously changed.  I can recall a number of other projects (open source and propriety) that have found their source code made vulnerable by someone intruding into their servers.  What is always important to customers in these cases is disclosure and transparency.  So far, PHP-Fusion seems to be doing the right thing.

However, as of this Thursday morning...it looks like PHP-Fusion's hosting company has suspended their account. At the time of this writing, there is no words given as to the reasons for the suspension.  I suspect the suspension is likely to be security related.  Perhaps, we'll see an announcement at SourceForge on the status of PHP-Fusion if their home site doesn't come back online soon.

By golly, Joomla has been awarded as the Best PHP Open Soure CMS in Packt Publishing's 2007 awards.

Joomla! is today revealed as the Award's third category winner, claiming Best Open Source PHP Content Management System. Last year's overall winner came out on top ahead of Drupal in second and e107 in third place and receives $2,000.

Joomla! was selected as the winner in the Best PHP category due to "its good front-end for administrators and end-users, which gives users a simple and traditional company website straight out of the box".

Now here is the interesting and confusing part, just because Joomla has won the Best PHP Open Souce does not mean they'll be winning the Overall Winner category.  How can this be if the same five open source CMS (CMS Made Simple, Drupal, e107, Joomla, and PHP-Fusion)  that were selected as finalists in the Best PHP are also in the Overall Winner Category?  Well my friends, each category has a different panel of judges that may approach CMS applications with a different perspective.

You'll note that all the judges on the Best PHP panel come from a PHP-centric background.  However, the judges in the Overall Winner panel are less language specific and perhaps takes a more well-rounded information system approach to content management systems.  In other words, CMS Made Simple, Drupal, e107, and PHP-Fusion could easily be announced on Friday as the winner  in the Overall category.  Then again, Joomla! seems to have the lucky magic when it comes to these type of competitions.

There is only one week left to vote for the CMS finalists in Packt Publishing's Open Source Content Management System Award.  If you haven't voted for what you think is the best open source CMS, I would encourage you to vote.  In my opinion, you should vote even in those categories where your favorite CMS may not have made it through the public nomination process.  Remember, not everyone is that sold on open source content management systems.  In other words this award, and those like it, is a chance to help newcomers find the best of the best in open source CMS.

The voting results should really be very interesting this year with five finalists to choose from in each of the five categories.  The five categories in the Packt award are  Most Promising, Best PHP CMS, Best Other (Non-PHP) CMS, Best Social Networking CMS, and Overall Winner.  The five finalists in the Overall category include CMS Made Simple, Drupal, e107, Joomla!, and PHP-Fusion.

Since I'm needing some time to figure out how best to use the Drupal contributed Advertisement module, I've decided to promote via banners each of the five CMS finalists in the Overall CMS Winner category.

On Monday, Packt Publishing announced the five finalists in each category of its 2007 Open Source Content Management System Award.  The five categories are Most Promising, Best PHP CMS, Best Other (Non-PHP) CMS, Best Social Networking CMS, and Overall Winner.  In the finals stage, the public as a whole is eligible to vote for each category through October 26th.  While that may seem like a long time for the polls to be open, I'd encourage you to vote early so that you have no excuse for why your favorite CMS didn't make it to the winners list.

Around this time last year, Packt Publishing announced the "top five" finalists for their award (no separate categories in 2006).  In 2006, those CMS projects that made it to the finalist list included Drupal, e107, Joomla, Plone, and Xoops.  When those five CMS were announced, I chose to double my efforts on covering those applications here at CMS Report.  Although the extra categories this year have brought quite a few more Open Source CMS into the foreground, I still don't see why I couldn't keep most of them on my CMS Focus radar scope.  With 16,000 people nominating their favorite CMS for this award, that amount of generated interest is hard to ignore.  Luckily, I already cover many of the CMS that did make it as a finalist...but there are still many new CMS on that list that will shake things up a bit here at CMSReport.com.