DNN

This year, I had the privilege of participating as a member on the judging panel for Packt Publishing's Overall Best Open Source CMS Award. As I mentioned last month, WordPress was declared the winner of the award followed by MODx, SilverStripe, DotNetNuke, and finally XOOPS. Since the award announcement, I've had a lot of inquiries asking me how and in what order did I rank the content management systems. I decided to wait for a month before my posting my rankings of the Web applications because I wanted focus to remain on the declared winners and not my individual choices.

My rankings for the Overall Best Open Source CMS (with number one being the highest) were:

1. WordPress
2. DotNetNuke
3. SilverStripe
4. MODx
5. XOOPS

Each of the judges on the panel, selects their top three CMS from the five included in this category. The judges are given a lot of reign for how they rank the CMS and may consider a number of factors such as performance, usability, accessibility, ease of configuration and customization, scalability and security. Despite the criteria given, the fact is the best CMS is the CMS you determine is best in meeting your project requirements. In other words, you may find that all five CMSes in this category meet your project needs or in some cases none of the given applications will meet your requirements. Despite how I ranked the CMS you still need to do your own homework before choosing what your "best" CMS.

Last week, DotNetNuke Corp announced the availability of DotNetNuke Professional Edition 5.1. This edition is the latest release of its web content management and application development framework for business-critical websites and web applications built on Microsoft .NET. The DotNetNuke Professional Edition is built on the same open source core as the free DotNetNuke Community Edition but includes several exclusive features and is fully supported and documented. The annual DotNetNuke Professional Edition subscription costs $1,999 per instance.

New features added to both the community and professional editions of DotNetNuke 5.1 include:

• Added Management Console to simplify access to admin functions
• Auditing for core tables to increase security
• Content Approval and Versioning
• Stop banners displaying and clickthrough count incrementing when indexed by crawlers
• Skin Event Handling
• Google Analytics Support
• Custom XML Sitemap Ranks

Besides the new features and normal bug fixes, DotNetNuke 5.1 also offers additional improvements over DotNetNuke 5.0 including:

For the second straight year, Packt Publishing has announced Drupal as the recipient of its Overall Open Source CMS Award.  Drupal was also the winner this year in the award category for Best PHP Open Source CMS.

Packt’s annual Open Source Content Management System (CMS) Award reached its climax today with the announcement that Drupal has won the Overall category, collecting a first prize of $5,000. Three months after it was launched and a staggering 20,000 votes later, Drupal finished ahead of Joomla! and DotNetNuke to retain the Award it won in 2007.

Joomla! also placed second in the Overall category followed by DotNetNuke for third position.

Packt Publishing announced the winner of their 2008 Best Open Source Other CMS Award and it is Plone.

Packt is delighted to exclusively reveal the first category winner of the 2008 Open Source CMS Award as Plone. Run[ning] on the Zope application server, Plone wins the Best Other Open Source CMS Award and receives $2,000. Also recognized by the judges were dotCMS and DotNetNuke who finished second and third respectively, both picking up $500.

I'm still in need to read this InfoWorld article in its entirety, but thought it was worth mentioning now.  InfoWorld's Mike Heck has written an article, Open source CMSes prove well worth the price, which reviews and compares five content management systems.  The five CMS under review are Alfresco, DotNetNuke, Drupal, Joomla, and Plone.

The good news is that all five CMS ranked Very Good or higher. However, Alfresco was the only CMS that ranked Excellent with a score of 9.2.  Plone 3.0 received the second highest ranking with a score of 8.6.  DotNetNuke and Joomla tied for third and fourth place with a score of 8.4 which put Drupal a fraction lower with a score of 8.3.  While none of these CMS ranked poorly, I'm sure the open source communities are bound to scrutinize over how the individual criteria were scored and ranked.

A series of posts and questions on the CMS blogs are asking whether Microsoft should help finance the costs of open source projects. I have no opinion to give that would add value to this topic. However, I'm happy to give the rundown so far of the posts that speak the loudest regarding Microsoft and open source projects.

The thread of blog posts seems to originate with a post at Dave's Tech Shop. In that post, Dave talks about the need for Microsoft to better support open source projects. Dave's reasoning: