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.

Simple PHP Blog 0.5.0.1, a maintenance release, went public on Tuesday of this week.  I know I don't talk too much about it here, but I still like to keep at least one eye open on this particular blogging application.  For you see, I consider Simple PHP Blog my very first Web content management system (WCMS).

Three or four years ago was when I began my exploration into the world of Web content management systems for personal use. It was a period of transition for me. My primary Web language was slowly shifting from Perl to PHP. I also had a strong desire to move away from static HTML pages for my "family" site to something a little more dynamic and evolving. However, while I was ready to take on the CMS I wasn't ready to fork over the extra money my host provider was asking for a single MySQL database. Until my hosting contract was up, I only had one choice...install a CMS that stored the data on the drive as "flat files" instead of an online database.

"The label 2.0 has become so overused that it is now a tic, a reflex action, a device that gets trotted out because someone thinks it sounds both hip and techie. And it did — for a while. Now it’s tired."

-Steve Fox, "Too Tired of 2.0", InfoWorld, June 26, 2006

 
Two quick comments I would like to make about this week's quote.

1. If 2.0 sounds techie but is not techie, what is? Oh how about 0.4.8 or 0.3. alpha2. It may not sound hip, but it is techie. Techies obviously see a difference between 0.4.7 and 0.4.9. And what happens when we get to 0.5.0? In the software development world that's a paradigm shift.
    
   
2. By now you should realize that the "quote of the week" doesn't have to be from this week. It can take me weeks to catch up on all my trade journals.

"The Archives menu in the sidebar can get pretty tall. If you don't want to display any of the entry text, edit the scripts/sb_theme.php file. Look for the menu_display_blognav_tree function.Change this:

$str = read_menus_tree( $month, $year, $day );

To this:

$str = read_menus_tree( $month, $year, $day, 0 );"

More...