Voting now open for 2010 Open Source Awards

The nomination stage is now closed and voting has begun in the 2010 Open Source Awards.

Your vote could reward an open source project with cash awards (I know the developers will appreciate that!) Registering to vote will require your name and email, and it's a single button click to cast your vote.

You can cast your vote here.

Here are the finalists, in categories:

Open Source CMS Award

Every Content Management System (CMS) that is based on one of the Open Source licenses is eligible to participate for this category.

Finalists:

CMS Made Simple

MODx

mojoPortal

SilverStripe

XOOPS

Hall of Fame CMS

This category is reserved for those CMSes that have won the Overall Open Source CMS Award at least once in the past. Since the launch of the award in 2006, only Joomla!, Drupal and WordPress have won the Overall Open Source CMS Award, therefore, this category will feature only those three participants in 2010.

Finalists

Drupal

Joomla!

WordPress

25,000 Russian Hack Attacks Repulsed in Two Days

More than six hundred Russian hackers have been trying to hack down a server-installed content management software in attempt to get over its sophisticated Proactive Protection system. There had been more than 25,000 attacks recorded and effectively repulsed during the software crash test competition hours. The competition was organized by the Bitrix, Inc. team and Positive Technologies IT experts during the "Chaos Constructions CC9 Festival" that took place on 29-30 August 2009 in Saint Petersburg, Russia.

Both the Festival participants and comers from the Internet were instigated to try to evade the Bitrix brand new Proactive Protection security system as part of the "Bitrix Real-Time Hack Competition". The Bitrix, Inc. team claimed their advanced content management system software can withstand a most aggressive hack attack.

The Festival competitors and the Internet comers got a leg-up, though: the Proactive Protection security system (WAF / Web Application Firewall Plus) had been to some extent modified before the competition in advance, just to be a little bit more "vulnerable". The point of this hack competition was to gain more examples for analyzing common mistakes made by site developers and to show how the new security system shield works in action.

"The only efficacious method has been discovered by a really professional IT specialist who could use some of the Internet Explorer drawbacks and turn them into a tool to evade the Bitrix protection. Nevertheless, all life-threatening attacks have been prevented by the software security modules" said Marcel Nizaque, Bitrix, Inc. IT security specialist. The Proactive Protection security system has been revised a new right after the competition and now free updates are already available for the Bitrix customers and partners through the SiteUpdate.

Drupal and Wordpress are 2009 Webware winners

Once again, both Drupal and Wordpress are winners in CNET's annual Webware 100. According to CNET editor, Rafe Needleman, "nearly 630,000 votes were cast during the voting this year to pick the best Web 2.0 sites and services".

This isn't the first year that Drupal and Wordpress have won the Social and Publishing category in Webware 100. As I mentioned last year, both Drupal and Wordpress are the only content management systems that have been winners in the Webware 100. That fact perhaps says a lot about not only these CMS but also the influence quality open source applications currently have with software consumers.

Third Annual Open Source CMS Award Launched

The 2008 Open Source CMS Award launched today, inviting people to visit www.PacktPub.com and submit nominations for their favorite Open Source Content Management Systems. Now in its third year, the Award has helped to support a variety of Content Management Systems gain recognition in a crowded and high quality marketplace.

In 2007, Drupal ousted Joomla! as the overall winner of the Award, in what was another very close contest. With the introduction of four new categories in 2007, the Award succeeded in expanding the opportunities for a wider range of Open Source Content Management Systems to benefit. MODx won the inaugural Most Promising Open Source CMS Award, confirming its position as one of the most respected new CMS’s available. "Winning the award was a tremendous honor for MODx" said Ryan Thrash, co-founder of MODx. "For the team, it validates the past two years of hard work" he concluded.

A new category for 2008 is the Open Source CMS MVP Award, which will recognize the contributions to projects made by individuals that often go unnoticed. According to Damian Carvill, marketing manager at Packt, the company that runs the Award, this will prove to be a significant award. "For the large majority of Open Source projects, it is the tireless work from enthusiastic individuals that enable its growth and adoption, and these are the people that Packt feels is necessary to identify" Carvill said.

Drupal and Wordpress are Webware 100 Winners

Drupal and Wordpress, were the only CMS applications that made it to the winner list in CNET's hosted Webware 100.

Over 1.9 million votes were cast for the 300 finalists this year. These finalists were selected (by Webware editors) from a pool of over 5000 qualifying nominees. But the 100 winners were selected by popular vote. These winning 100 products represent the best of the Web, according the people who use it.

Both Drupal and Wordpress were two of ten winners in the "Publishing and Photography" category. The remaining eight winners in Webware's 100 publishing category were web services and didn't provide stand-alone applications you can install directly on your server.

SilverStripe: Google Contest ends, Winners to be chosen

The Google Highly Open Participation Contest ended after a hive of stunning
work over two months. SilverStripe begun with 60 tasks, and because
students get paid for each successfully completed task, SilverStripe had to
seek numerous times for Google to increase the funding to enlarge the
contest based on unanticipated student demand. In the end, about 180 tasks
were completed, three times the initial expectation.

XOOPS announces First Theme Contest 2008

"XOOPS is changing its look, thus, with the support of the Design Team, we decided to launch a Theme Contest to choose 3 new designs to be released with the next major XOOPS release and beyond. The contest is open to all : individual, group, or web agency (professional or not).

Now is your opportunity to take mouse and keyboard in hand and create the new XOOPS look"

Complete Story

The Google Highly Open Participation Contest

I have not had time to talk about Google's Highly Open Participation Contest. Luckily, Amy Stephen posted a good article about the contest at Open Source Community which I encourage you to read. In the article, she talks about the positives of this program for both the high school age coders as well as the open source communities involved.

As Amy mentions in her article, Google invited ten Open Source projects, including Apache Software Foundation, Drupal, GNOME, Joomla!, MoinMoin, Mono, Moodle, Plone, Python and SilverStripe to participate. In Google's own words this is what they have to say about their program:

Wayback challenge: When was your first site?

While most bloggers are using the new year to look ahead, I am not quite ready to make promises to the year of 2007. In fact, I am more inclined to looking at the past thanks to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.

I'd like to challenge anyone who has designed a web page to find the oldest site in the archive that they authored and post the Wayback Machine link in the comment section of this post. There are no prizes being awarded in this "contest" but I promise you can have some space for bragging rights. Feel free to include any history on the page that you feel is necessary to tell your story.

The archive contains archived web pages from 1996 to the near present. The oldest web pages I could find that I authored was from 1997 for the National Weather Service's forecast office in Sioux Falls, SD.

The above site actually originated in March 1996, but this 1997 image is the earliest I could find in the archive. Not very impressive is it? However, you have to remember that I was authoring with HTML 1.x and worried that Netscape's introduction of the blink element was pushing the envelope further than I wanted to go.

Packt Publishing announcing CMS winners this week

Developers and users of five content management systems (CMS) have been anxiously waiting for Packt Publishing to announce the winner of their Packt Open Source CMS Award. Packt Publishing is expected to announce on Tuesday, November 14th, the top three CMS along with the winner.

The winning CMS will get US $5,000, the second will get US $3,000 and the third placed finalist will get US $2,000.

As I mentioned a couple months ago, the top five CMS were nominated by the public are all that remain eligible for the award. Those five CMS include:

I would expect that Packt Publishing will make announcement of the winner on their Open Source CMS Award page. Until then, I'll go out on a limb with my own prediction. I predict that Drupal, Joomla, and Plone will be listed by Packt's judges as the top three CMS for 2006. Whether I'm correct or not, I will likely comment on the outcome of the award here on my own blog.

CMS Report

Focusing on today's Content Management Systems

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