Packt Publishing announced that ImpressCMS has won the Most Promising Open Source CMS category in their 2009 Open Source CMS Award.

While ImpressCMS took first place in this category, Pixie and Pligg weren’t far behind and settled for a tie in the first runner up spot.

ImpressCMS has featured in the top three in this category for the second time in a row, and has lived up to its reputation this year by winning the top spot.

Pixie and Pligg, on the other hand, featured in this category for the first time and managed to impress a lot of judges with their quality and support.

The "Most Promising" category is my favorite of all the categories in Packt's open source CMS award system. The CMSs in this category are lesser known applications requiring the judges on the panel to do a lot more homework than usual and sometimes coming up with some surprises in their analysis. This category is Packt's biggest contribution for getting lesser known open source CMSs the exposure they most likely deserve.

Last year, I had the honor of judging the Most Promising category and was pleased to see SilverStripe get the nod from this award. In 2008, ImpressCMS was also evaluated for this category and left me with a positive impression.

Yes, it's that time of year again. Packt Publishing recently announced the five finalists in each of the categories of its 2009 Open Source CMS Award. The Voting for the winners in each of the five categories ends on October 30, 2009.  This "public vote" will then be combined with votes by a panel of judges with the top three CMS and overall winners in each category to be announced on November 9, 2009.

This year, I will be participating as a judge for the Overall Open Source CMS Award. I have the honor of sharing the judging panel with John Resig of jQuery fame, Deane Barker of Gadgetopia and Blend Interactive, and Karen Coombs from Web Services at the University of Houston Libraries. I'm especially excited to be working with Deane Barker, a fellow Sioux Falls resident. Over the years, Deane and I have had some great discussions on content management systems. It will be interesting to find out whether we will be agreeing with each other or not on which CMS should be considered the top CMS for the Overall category.

Previous winners in the Overall category have included Drupal (2007, 2008) and  Joomla! (2006) as the overall winner. Previous winners of the Overall category are not eligible for the Overall category in 2009 as Packt Publishing apparently wanted to prevent the Overall category of being dominated by past winners. The good news is that both Drupal and Joomla are eligible to compete in the new Hall of Fame category and are also finalists in the Best Open Source PHP CMS category.