$5000 Award for Open Source CMS

The Citizen writes "Packt Publishing has released details of an award scheme for open source Content Management Systems to enter and win a $5,000 prize. From the article: 'The Packt Open Source Content Management System Award is designed to encourage, support, recognize and reward an Open Source Content Management System (CMS) that has been selected by a panel of judges and visitors to PacktPub.com.' They're asking for people to submit nominations for their favorite open source Content Management System now."

Comments

Re:Parameters?

[Rekolitus]

Some of my own:

• Having to go to extensive measures to convince the CMS that you want to add a static page, no, not a news item
• Hard-coded HTML within the CMS itself
• Bloated core (features that not everyone will need implemented in the core, not a plugin/module/etc)
• Bloated default installation (I want a content management system, not a "community" management system, and 99% of my website visitors don't need to see a login form)
• CMSes that simply don't give you enough control over what HTML is output

Documentation!

[massysett]

I hope the contest rewards documentation! A CMS is not a simple beast, yet the systems I have examined (I remember Joomla and its predecessors, in particular) were not well documented. The best docs I could find for Joomla was some tutorial posted by a user in a phpBB forum. A great CMS isn't too useful if it can't be figured out because there are no docs.

Re:Mambo will get it

[neersign]

just to follow the same train of thought, Joomla forked a few months ago from Mambo because of licensing issues, i believe. I have used a few different CMS's over the years, and I can say that Joomla (which I currently use for 3 websites) is good but not great. The back end is a little cumbersome for my non-webnerd friends. My biggest pet-peeve is that the front end is not 100% customizable without editing code. You only have a handful of options on how the modules are displayed, but these options will be fine for the majority of people. Joomla has a large community and a large collection of "plugins" so it shouldn't be hard for anyone to get a feature rich website running quickly.

I used e107 for a while, and the one thing I liked better about e107 is that the frontend is 100% customizable. You define exactly how you want each element to be displayed, but I can see how Joomla's approach is easier for novice users. I can't remember specifically why I stopped using e107, but I do remember I was never satisfied with the "plugins".

just last night I discovered Drupal. I installed it on my webserver to try it out, and I can tell you that the installation process is nowhere near as nice an experience as Joomla's. Other than that, I can't tell you much about Drupal because it took me too long to get the thing running, but it looks very promising.

in closing, I too believe Joomla will get this award, and I think it is well deserved.

If you want to try them before voting...

[crimperman]

Without having to install.

http://www.opensourcecms.com/

Surprised nobody has mentioned that site yet. You get to try them as demos which are reset every two hours or so.

Re:easy to pick the best

[Saeger]

A much better site to compare CMS's is OpenSourceCMS.com. They're all OpenSource and PHP-based, which is many, but you won't find Plone and some others there. At least you can do a live demo of them all without having to localinstall it first, and you can view the popularity ratings.

I've been back to the site a few times to check out the state of the CMS-space, but I still rank Drupal, Xoops, Joomla/Mambo, and MODx at the top.