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

 

Share Your Enterprise Plone Deployment Story… Win an iPod! - This is your chance to win an entry to the panel discussion on “Plone and Large Enterprises” at the 2006 Plone conference. [Plone News]

Plone 2.5.1 and 2.1.4 released - We have prepared two new releases of the 2.5.x and 2.1.x series with default policy improvements to counter the spam attacks that some Plone sites have been a victim of lately. This is a required upgrade for all Plone sites, please be a responsible administrator and update your sites as soon as possible. [Plone News]

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.

Submission by Alan Runyan

The 2006 New Orleans Plone Symposium will be this March 8-10, 2006 at the Astor Crowne Plaza in the famous New Orleans French Quarter. The goal of this year’s gathering is to share ideas on relevant topics through discussions around the pragmatic usage of Plone and real-world experiences of organizations like Disney and fundable.org. While technology is always the core focus of open source technology events, this year's symposium will also addresses specific business topics including law, non-profits, venture capital and business models.

Submission by Peter Helfer

http://www.cmsinfo.ch will be the swiss ressource of the most common Opensource CMS.

Submission by Damian Carvill

The spirit of Open Source was extended today with the news that Packt Publishing is paying royalties from each book they sell to the open source project it is written on.

Open Source is focused on providing users with software that is free to modify, redistribute and ultimately free to use. The nature of being Open Source means that projects have largely relied on the generosity and goodwill of an enthusiastic community in order to prosper. Packt Publishing is responding to this need by choosing to allocate a portion of the revenues from each book they sell to the open source project the book is written on.

Submission by Quintagroup Quintagroup is pleased to announce the release version 0.2.0 of qRSS2Syndication product. qRSS2Syndication is developed to add RSS2 functionality to Plone. What is qRSS2Syndication?qRSS2Syndication is a product designed by Quintagroup to generate RSS2 feeds in Plone sites. qRSS2Syndication includes support of audio and video feeds. qRSS2Syndication allows the syndication of ATAudio objects, mp3, wmv, ppt, jpg files using RSS 2.0 with enclosures. For further information have a look at the qRSS2Syndication Plone product page, which describes the product in depth.

Submission by Damian Carvill

Learn from Plone expert Cameron Cooper how to develop all the skills you need to become an accomplished Plone developer.