$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

who can submit it?

[agent dero]

I'm not a developer on the project or anything...but can I go ahead and submit Drupal :)

It really is a great open source CMS...just not mine ;)

There's a lot of competition then

[Supersonic1425]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Open_source_ content_management_systems

easy to pick the best

[Anonymous Coward]

from 606! open source CMS systems to choose from

http://www.cmsmatrix.org/

dont ever think that OSS doesnt give you a choice
and choice is good right ?

I Favor Xoops

[patio11]

I had to review something like a dozen of these for work last year (the technology incubator I work at went on a blogging kick and tried to pitch the idea to all of our client companies). Xoops was far and away my favorite, mostly because it was one of the only ones I could get working in under an hour. It also had an attractive layout out of the box and had modules for blogs/forums/news posts, which were essentially everything our clients had on their wishlists. Installing RedHatCMS, by comparison, is painful enough to be the subject of a Japanese game show* except the episode would have to last about three weeks.

* "HAHA! Stupid contestant, your version of Tomcat is incompatible! Your punishment is having to wipe your machine and start over!" Which would be bloody close to what kept happening in real life, too, since after you botched an install of the thing the quickest way to get the next install working without causing compatibility issues was to reinstall Linux from CD.

Parameters?

[Richard W.M. Jones]

What are the parameters for a good CMS?

Many CMSes (both open and closed source) fail on issues that really matter, like:

• Not having stupid URLs like /cms.cgi?pageid=1234
• Putting lots of <table>s in the layout rather than using semantic markup
• Putting page content too late in the page so search engines have to work harder to find it, or generally being unfriendly to robots
• Not setting page metadata usefully
• Not including accessibility features like access keys, forcing ALT text, jump to navigation
• Not providing stylesheets for different @media
• Not integrating well with analysis tools so you can see where people are coming from, what they do, whether your visitors are going up or down, are they reading the pages you think they should be reading, etc.
• Speed
• Ease of configuration (hello, Plone)
• Providing workflow which is either too difficult to set up, or too complicated to understand for the users, or over/under-kill for the requirements of the site

Rich.

I've never met a CMS...

[onosendai]

..that I actually liked

As a professional, I've very rarely seen clients who want a CMS ever actually use them the way they're intended. They either contract back to the developer to maintain their own projects or they spiral into development hell.

To often, the idea of a CMS far outweigh's their reality, simple HTML/CSS with a few lessons in the basics of editing often end up cheaper and more effective than deploying and maintaining the cheapest OSS title

.. saying that, +1 Drupal. Well designed, nice architecture, decent documentation and great user-base, the four horseman of a decent CMS.

Re:who can submit it? Rules and slash

[Lord Satri]

FTA: "If you're a fan of a particular CMS or if you're part of a CMS project team, then we're looking for your nominations."

What's more curious is, from the rules: "3. The five open source Content Management Systems with the most nominations will go through to the final 4. The top three will be voted for by a panel of three judges. A final fourth vote will come from the results of a public vote on www.PacktPub.com."

So it seems the number of nominations matters a lot in case of this award, which doesn't necessarily promote quality over popularity.

I also wonder if slashcode itself should be amongst the runners. Slashcode isn't really widely used for various reasons (e.g. installation, perl development, features) and it's not like if 5000$ would make any difference to slash developers (I'm wrong?). Which makes me ask what are the requisite features a CMS must have to be considered a CMS. Agreeing on some definitions would be useful for such a contest.

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.

Re:Mambo will get it

[hey!]

Well, one of the main things to consider is the availability of products for a CMS platform. Mambo has an active developer community producing interesting products.

The big problem with Mambo is that the security model is too simplistic. Thus products such as DocMan have to role their own ACL system. This is bad, because a CMS should allow you to manage users orthagonally to applications that run on it.