Good Web Practices has a new post comparing three of everyone's favorite content management systems, Wordpress, Joomla, and Drupal [link broken]. The comparisons the author makes between the three CMS are fair as he weighs out the positives and negatives of each CMS. Those that "get" open source will also like the way he concludes his article.
Andrew Eddie has written an article at SitePoint titled, Introducing Joomla. He writes a good article, although in this stage of the game I'm not sure why Joomla! needs introductions. Joomla! is a well known open source CMS in content management circles.
The year 2008 was another great year for CMS Report. In 2008, we posted close to 500 articles to the front page. Below are the ten most read articles that were posted for the year.
Similar to last year, three of the top stories have little to do with content management systems. It seems that there is more interest in gadgets than content management systems! Hopefully CMS Report can help change that.
For the second straight year, Packt Publishing has announced Drupal as the recipient of its Overall Open Source CMS Award. Drupal was also the winner this year in the award category for Best PHP Open Source CMS.
Packt’s annual Open Source Content Management System (CMS) Award reached its climax today with the announcement that Drupal has won the Overall category, collecting a first prize of $5,000. Three months after it was launched and a staggering 20,000 votes later, Drupal finished ahead of Joomla! and DotNetNuke to retain the Award it won in 2007.
Joomla! also placed second in the Overall category followed by DotNetNuke for third position.
Drupal was announced the winner in Packt Publishing's 2008 award for Best PHP Based Open Source CMS.
The Award for the best Open Source Content Management System written on a PHP/MySQL platform is today announced as Drupal. Receiving $2,000 as the judges’ and publics favourite, Drupal finishes ahead of Joomla! and CMS Made Simple, who finished on equal points as joint runners up and collect $500 each.
Earlier today, Packt Publishing announced the winners of their 2008 Open Source CMS Most Valued People Award. The MVP is a new category for Packt's annual Open Source CMS Awards. In this category, "names were put forward by members of the Content Management System's development team and community and represent the exceptional support, guidance, and sheer amount of time that the MVPs have given up to support the development and growth of the respective CMS".
Instead of just copying the winners list from Packt's site, I had hoped to do something different here. I started with a goal to look for each of the MVP's personal blog or project site, I had hoped to find acknowledgments of the award was given by the MVP themselves or by someone else on their behalf. Evidently I started searching a little too early and I only came across mentions of the awards from three four of the projects: Drupal (Earl Miles), Joomla! (Johan Janssens), and XOOPS (Onakazu). Plus... Plone.
Below are some excerpts from or about these open source MVPs. If you are aware of more of the award winners recognizing or being recognized for their contributions...I would appreciate a link to the post. Open source contributors like these MVPs deserve all the recognition we can give them.
Amit from Joomlatools contacted me to introduce me to their new company as well as their new product, Nooku. The introduction is somewhat ironic given the fact that Johan already contacted me last Spring. I have also had a link to Joomlatools' blogs in my Blogroll for a number of months!
However, it sounds like they're doing exciting stuff over at Joomlatools that should make quite a bit of the Joomla! community happy. Nooku looks like a great product and the extension/framework should help Joomla! 1.5 users create multi-lingual websites more easily. I wish the best for Joomlatools.
The April issue of Adobe Edge contains the article, Review of open source content management systems. The article provides an overview of what the author describes as "five of the top open source software (OSS) solutions". The five open source CMS included in the author's list are CMS Made Simple, Drupal, Joomla!, WordPress, and XOOPS. After reading the article, I found myself wondering how we "reviewers" can actually improve our reviews of open source CMS. More importantly, I've come to the realization that I can no longer claim to be non-biased in which CMS I believe is the best out there.
The author does a fine job in the article describing the similarities and differences between the CMS being reviewed. However, one of the issues I have in this article and many others I've read that review CMS is the big jumps in the conclusion:
Drupal, Joomla!, and XOOPS are best for building an e-commerce site because all three offer:
- Inventory management
- Support for third-party payment processing mechanisms (such as PayPal)
- Modules for shipping and sales tax calculators
- Shopping cart functionality
While it is true that Drupal, Joomla! and XOOPS can do e-commerce, none of these CMS can do that straight out of the box. I can just imagine a shop owner or design company trying Drupal, Joomla!, or XOOPS for the very first time and wondering, "how the heck do I get a shopping-cart into the CMS?". While the author does hint in the article that third-party modules are needed to make the e-commerce work, I think the author would have been better off better explaining that "some work is required" to get those features into the CMS.
Alldrupalthemes.com did a performance comparision between Joomla 1.5 & Drupal 6.1. As the author of the post infers, the numbers collected may not mean much to the user in the "real world" and limitations in the test results should be noted. Nevertheless, numbers that compare Drupal and Joomla performance are always interesting.
The conclusions drawn from the results are:
One of the neat things about managing a site like CMSReport.com is that discussion on a topic can happen when you least expected. This is exactly what happened in the comment section of a rather benign post regarding a Latin American University's use of the content management system, Joomla! I was thanked by Open Source Community's Amy Stephen, also a Joomla! user, for posting an excerpt from one of the Joomla! working group blogs. Instead of a "you're welcome" I decided to ask some questions that have been puzzling me about the Joomla! community for some time.