Drupal.org: Drupal 5.0 released -

After 8 months of development we are ready to release Drupal 5.0 to the world. Today is also Drupal's 6th birthday, so the timing could not be more perfect. Drupal 4.0 was released in 2002 and finally we feel confident to increase the major version number from 4 to 5.

Drupal powers sites across the web, ranging from the personal weblog of Tim Berners-Lee, podcast sites like TWIT.tv, community driven sites like SpreadFireFox.com, artist communities like Terminus 1525 to large media sites like TheOnion.com, MTV and even sites for NASA.

Following a nomination round and eight weeks of voting, Packt are pleased to announce Joomla! as the winner of the 2006 Open Source Content Management System Award. Joomla! collects a first prize of $5,000 and the title of Packt Open Source CMS Award Winner for 2006.

The final result, as voted for by judges from The Open Source Collective, MySQL, the Eclipse Foundation, and 16,000 users on www.PacktPub.com saw a tie for first place between Joomla! and Drupal. In the event of a tie, a fourth independent judge would be brought in. This was Apoorv Durga who is a member of CM Pros and runs his own blog [http://apoorv.info/] on portals and content management. This crucial vote ended up with Joomla! triumphing over Drupal by one point. The final result was as follows:

1. Joomla!- $5,000
2. Drupal - $3,000
3. Plone - $2,000

Please note that in deciding the final positions judges were asked to give their top three, with their first choice receiving 3 points, second receiving two points and third place one point. Choosing the top three proved to be a difficult experience for the judges, due to the quality of the finalists and their ability to suit different tasks depending on the objective of the user. "All the CMS’s that made the top 5 are very good" declared Scott Goodwin, representing The Open Source Collective, "and I wouldn't hesitate to use any of them depending on what I'm trying to accomplish." 

Idealware published a nice overview piece "Comparing Open Source CMSes: Joomla, Drupal and Plone." 

 Open source content management systems can make creating and managing your website a lot easier - and there's no licensing fee involved.  But which should you use?  We look carefully at Joomla, Drupal, and Plone to compare their strengths and weaknesses.

Read the article at Idealware:   http://www.idealware.org/articles/joomla_drupal_plone.php

 

del.icio.us: The APC and Web Networks Release Drupal Usability Report | drupal.org - [Drupal Talk]

After six weeks and registering almost twelve thousand nominations, the Open Source CMS Award finalists can be revealed. The following final five received the most public nominations during the course of the six weeks and are listed in alphabetical order:

• Drupal
• e107
• Joomla
• Plone
• Xoops

Congratulations to these finalists and thank you to everyone who nominated. The result was extremely close with very few votes separating the finalists. These five will now go through to a final stage of voting, with the eventual winner being announced on November 14. A panel of independent judges and votes taken from visitors to www.PacktPub.com will go towards deciding the eventual winner. Voting will commence on September 12 and will run until November.

Lullabot also responsible for user front-end experience on
MTV’s newest online destination mtvflux.co.uk

London – August 21, 2006 – Lullabot (www.lullabot.com) has partnered with MTV Networks UK & Ireland to provide back-end support and management to the newly updated mtv.co.uk consumer website. Using Drupal technology the site will continue to host news and information for all of MTV UK’s current broadcast channels but will provide an enhanced user experience through use of Drupal’s community ready core functionality.

Using open source software to design, develop, and deploying a collaborative Web site, Part 5: Getting started with Drupal - IBM's Series of articles brings a nice introduction to Drupal in Part 5.

The next version of Drupal is shaping up nicely and the current CVS seems pretty stable.

One nice feature in the upcoming release are template "suggestions". This is an array that gets built and converted into a list of filenames to look for alternate templates. This works for pages as well as blocks.