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.

Packt has opened up nominations for people to submit their favorite Content Management System at www.PacktPub.com/Award. The top five in each category will go through to final, which begins at the start of September. For more information, please visit Packt’s website www.PacktPub.com/Award.

Packt is pleased to announce the release of WordPress Themes Design, which is a complete guide to creating professional WordPress themes. Written by Tessa Blakeley Silver, this book will be invaluable to WordPress users or visual designers who want to develop a WordPress theme.

WordPress is an open-source blog engine released under the GNU general public license. It allows users to easily create dynamic blogs with great content and many outstanding features. It is an ideal tool for developing blogs and though it is chiefly used for blogging, it can also be used as a complete CMS with very little effort. Its versatility and ease of use has attracted a large, enthusiastic, and helpful community of users.

Learning Drupal 6 Module Development is a new book from Packt, which acts as a practical tutorial for creating Drupal 6 modules with PHP. Written by Matt Butcher, this book will help users to walk through the development of complete Drupal 6 Modules.

Drupal is a free and open-source modular web application framework and content management system (CMS) written in PHP. It can run in many environments, including Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and FreeBSD. It's a modular system, with an elegant hook-based architecture, and great code. These are a few of the perks that make Drupal a choice platform for developers who want the power of an established CMS, but the freedom to make it work for them. From social networking to AJAX to e-commerce, the hundreds of existing modules attest to Drupal's flexibility.

Following the latest release of Drupal 6 in February 2008, Packt Publishing is pleased to announce an update to David Mercer’s best selling Drupal 4.7 book. Building powerful and robust websites with Drupal 6 is as much of an overhaul of the original book as Drupal 6 is over Drupal 4.7.

Drupal is a hugely popular and widely celebrated open-source Content Management System that is day-by-day becoming the first choice of people for building blogs and other websites. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Hillary Clinton, and many others utilize Drupal to fulfil their online requirements.

The updated book meets the booming demand for well presented, clear, concise, and above all practical information on how to move from establishing the need for a website all the way through to designing and building it like a pro, and finally successfully managing and maintaining it.

Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5 is a new book from Packt which is written as a practical step-by-step guide to building a website from scratch. Written by Hagen Graf, this book takes the reader through the tasks essential to create a Joomla! website as rapidly as possible.

Joomla! started as a fork from Mambo in 2005, when many of the original developers of the Mambo CMS moved to working on Joomla! It has rapidly grown in popularity and is a cutting Edge Content Management System and one of the most powerful Open Source Content Management systems in the world. It is used world-wide for anything from simple homepages to complicated corporate websites. It is easy to install, easy to manage and very reliable.

Birmingham, UK, March 17 – Packt Publishing today announced that its donations to Open Source projects surpassed the $100,000 mark. Following its first donation to the phpMyAdmin project in April 2004, the company has gone on to provide sustained support for over thirty different open source projects.