Alfresco Software today announced the winners of its 2007 Annual Content Excellence Awards. The debut year for the awards program recognizes its top partners and contributors in the categories of Partner of the Year, Content Management and Collaboration Implementation of the Year, Web Content Management Implementation of the Year, and Contributor of the Year, in Europe and North America.

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Packt Publishing announced that Drupal has won their Overall 2007 Open Source Content Management System Award.

After three intense months of voting, Packt Publishing can today announce that Drupal has won the Overall 2007 Open Source CMS Award. With 18,000 votes on Packt’s website, coupled with the expert opinions from a panel of judges, Drupal succeeds Joomla! as the overall winner and receives a cheque for $5,000.

Joomla!, last year's award winner, placed second this year and was awarded $3,000. CMS Made Simple collected $2,000 with a placement in the number three spot. This year, Packt awarded open source CMS projects a total of $20,000 in prize money in five different categories.

The announcement by Packt quotes Jeff Eaton, a core developer speaking on behalf of Drupal, as saying, "We've worked hard to make Drupal as flexible, as scalable, and as accessible as possible. It's a great week for all of Open Source; the winners in every category have shown that OSS can produce powerful solutions for a wide range of needs." The announcement by Packt also reaffirms Jeff's statement that all the projects that made it as finalists should be congratulated.

The fun continues this week with Packt Publishing announcing another winner in their 2007 Open Source Content Management System Awards.  Packt Publishing announced MODx as the winner of the Most Promishing Open Source CMS category!

Packt can exclusively reveal that MODx has won the Most Promising Open Source Content Management System in this year's Awards. As the fourth category winner, MODx came out on top ahead of TYPOlight and dotCMS, who came equal second.

Packt's announcement has a quote from MODx's co-founder,  Ryan Thrash, stating that  they "plan to live up to the Award title, and look forward to an incredible year for MODx complete with major releases, increased scalability and functionality, and even a few interesting surprises”.

Packt's Most Promising category is a very cool one and I think of all the award categories...this is the one that is most encouraging category for a young project.  I'm in agreement with Packt Publishing's announcement that this is an "extremely competitive and high quality field". 

Packt have awarded Joomla! $2000 for receiving the highest number of votes for 'Best PHP Open Source CMS', surpassing Drupal and e107 who came second and third, respectively.

The judges for this roundup noted Joomla!'s "good front-end for administrators and end-users" as well as the large community that supports the Joomla! project.

Last year Joomla! was the winner of the same (albeit modified) competition in which the CMS was awarded $5000.

Packt still has two more cash prizes to give away over the next two days for the 'Most Promising Open Source CMS' and 'Overall Winner'. However, considering the nominees for Overall Winner and Best PHP Open Source CMS are identical, the final results should come as no surprise.

Source: http://www.packtpub.com/award

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.

Packt Publishing is creating quite an exciting week in the world of open source content management systems.  The publishing company announced the winner of their Best Open Source Other CMS Award and it's mojoPortal!

Packt can exclusively reveal the second category winner of the Open Source Content Management System Award as mojoPortal, winning Best Other Open Source CMS. In another tight category, mojoPortal came out ahead of Plone and Silva who came second and third respectively.

Congratulations to mojoPortal for recieving the award.  mojoPortal holds dear to CMS Report's heart on the simple fact that it's project leader, Joe Audette, really was the very first project leader that sent us an e-mail to call attention to his content management system.  I feel like we've grown up together.

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.

As I mentioned last month, Packt Publishing is currently taking nominations for their Open Source Content Management Systems Award.  Nominations are scheduled to close on August 31, 2007.  With the deadline less then two weeks away, there is no better time then the present to head over to their site and promote your favorite open source CMS.  Nominations are being accepted for each of the below categories (click to nominate):

• Overall Winner, Open Source CMS Award
• Most Promising Open Source Content Management System
  
• Best Open Source PHP Content Management System
• Best Other Open Source Content Management System
• Best Open Source Social Networking Conten

Packt publishing has also set aside a total of $20,000 in award money to be dispersed among the winners...so this isn't only a chance to for the open source projects to get some recognition but also a chance for the projects and their community to earn a little bit of cash.

Starting Monday July 16, Packt Publishing will be accepting nominations for their 2007 Open Source Content Management System Award.  Last year, I had fun watching closely as the top five open source CMS were nominated and I even made some predictions for which projects would be declared the winners.  This year, I'm also honored to announce that I have been selected as a judge for the Overall Winner category!

That's right, while I have my favorites when it comes to CMS, it looks as if I've proven myself to be non-bias and open-minded enough to be on the jury.   Ironically, I'm not the only one from Sioux Falls, South Dakota that will be on the judging panel.  Deane Barker, Gadgetopia and Blend Interactive, has also been selected as a judge for the social networking category.  Evidently, the long winter months in this part of the country has given us too much time to talk and discuss various topics such as technology, content management systems, and innovation.  Then again, it's also possible Sioux Falls is a lot more forward-thinking then people typically give credit to the city.  Either way, neither Deane or myself know anyone from Fargo.

If you recall, this is the award that last year, Joomla was declared by the judges as the winner, with Drupal in second place, followed by Plone in third place.   Different this year then in 2006 is that the CMS projects may be nominated by various categories and more prize money is being offered.