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

 

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.

Happy First Birthday, Joomla! - How time flies ... Joomla! is one year old today. With more than 2.5 million downloads, over 50 thousand members and fast approaching half a million posts — Joomla! has much to celebrate. The one most telling factor in all this is the monthly data transfer is currently hovering at around 1.8 terrabytes. To put this into perspective, we reported data usage of one terrabyte in May. Astounding growth. The core team wants to take this opportunity to thank the many who have supported the project with their skills, support and donations. There is no doubt the project, born from difficult times with the Mambo split, has both matured and grown, said project lead Johan Janssens. The milestones we have created this year include a more robust set of systems; hosting supported by Rochen (http://www.rochenhost.com/), the Simple Machines Forums (http://www.simplemachines.org/), Developer support through VA Software (http://www.vasoftware.com/sourceforge/) and, of course the amazingly successful Extension (http://extensions.joomla.org/) site. Johan said the momentum created by the team, developers and the community since Sept 01, 2005, had ensured Joomla! a bright and prosperous future. We saw baby Joomla! born exactly 12-months ago and how 'he' has matured in what seems a blink. During this time of evolution, we have been working hard on the next generation Joomla! — to be called version 1.5 — which will be more powerful than anything before. [Joomla]

Upgrade immediately to Joomla! 1.0.11 - Joomla! 1.0.11 [ Sunbird ] is now available as of Monday 28th August 2006 24:00 UTC for download here. and is being designated a Critical Security Release.

Drupal vs Joomla: performance | Dries Buytaert

 
Dries setup an experiment to benchmark drupal and joomla in a couple of scenarios.

 One test that stood out was that in his test, "Joomla's cache system improves performance by 12%".  Only 12%? This does not seem typical in my experience when caching with Drupal and phpSlash.  Anybody familiar with Joomla that can confirm or investigate?

Submission by Online Backgammon

Check this nice chart:

Google Trends CMS Comparison

Joomla rules the open source CMS platforms!

OnlineB,
Online Backgammon News

Submission by Rey Gigataras

 

Joomla! 1.0.9 [ Sunshine ] is now available as of Monday 05th June 2006 18:00 UTC for download here.

1.0.9 contains the following changes:

• 12 Low Level Security Fixes
• 160+ General bug fixes
• Several Performance enhancements

Although this release contains 12 security fixes, as they are of a low level nature, this release is being characterized as a Stabilitity/General release.

Submission by Asbru Ltd.

Asbru HardCore Web Content Editor v6.0.15 released
Asbru HardCore Web Content Editor v6.0.15 has been released. This version of the cross-browser/cross-platform web content editor for Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla and Safari web browsers adds:

• Improved URL handling.
• Improved CTRL+A DELETE handling (Firefox).
• Improved support for use with ASP.NET 2.0 website themes (ASP.NET).
• Various other improvements

Asbru Web Content Editor Mambot for Mambo and Joomla released
Asbru Web Content Editor Mambot for Mambo v4.5.3, Joombla v1.0.7 and compatibles has been released. The Mambot enables quick and easy integration of the Asbru HardCore Web Content Editor into Mambo and Joomla. The mambot enables:

• Configuration of use of BR or P when pressing (Alt/Ctrl/Shift).
• Configuration of a CSS Style Sheet.
• Configuration of advanced Media Manager and Hyperlink Manager.
• Configuration of the size of the editable area.

Free trial and further details available at:http://editor.asbrusoft.com/

Submission by Rey Gigataras
It's party time, folks! Today we proudly announce the launch of our Joomla! Extensions site. With Joomla! arguably the world's most popular open-source CMS and subsequently the largest active 3PD community, we're introducing the Extensions Directory to make things more fun. Yes, we have listened to the community about how it can be difficult to find things on the Forge. That message came through loud and clear and a working group has been furiously working behind the scenes to make things user-friendly.