14 DAY TRIAL // A while ago, we published an article and editorial about the nominations to the Packt CMS Awards. After a long period of voting, the results are in and controversy is out. This year's winners are WordPress, Plone, ImpressCMS and Drupal (yes, again).
Considered an equivalent of the “Best New Act” award at a regular MTV ceremony, the Most Promising Open Source CMS prize has been awarded after a long voting period to ImpressCMS. Even if it didn't win, honorable mentions and props were given to Pixie and Pligg that fell short of the first overall place just by a few votes.
The Best Other Open Source Award is regularly given to CMSs not written in PHP, the dominant scripting language on the web right now. This year's winner is Plone, a Python-based solution that outdid and out-voted dotCMS and mojoPortal.
In the most disputed category, and probably the one with all the big names, Best Open Source PHP CMS, Drupal was again voted as the winner, topping other famous names like Joomla!, WordPress, XOOPS, TYPOlight and MODx.
The Best Overall Open Source CMS, considered as the main prize of the evening, saw WordPress beating other open source solutions like XOOPS, DotNetNuke, MODx and SilverStripe, and opening the door to controversy yet again.
More and more critics are rising and speaking about WordPress's inclusion in these awards. The general opinion around the web is that WordPress is not a CMS, and only a blogging platform “with lot of plugins.” We do not subscribe to this opinion, since a basic Joomla installation does the same thing, and only after modules and components are added, will its features fit our needs. WordPress's plugins and lots of configuration options make it suitable for usage in any type of website frame, so it is an all-around solution for webmasters.
To silence the critics, maybe a good idea would be the introduction of a best blogging-platform prize in the next edition of the awards, but still that is not fair to the WP community.