Pimcore CMS Wins Most Promising Open Source Project Award from Packt

Pimcore, a Zend-based content management system won this year's Most Promising Open Source Project Award, in the annually competition organized by Packt Publishing.

“Winning this Award is a huge boost”, said Dietmar Rietsch, Pimcore founder. “It’s not simply about the money either, it’s the recognition of a year of hard work and dedication from the team and Pimcore’s community.”

The vote was opened to anyone interested, and stirred up quite a social media frenzy, with camps asking for support and votes from their communities.

A panel of judges cast their votes as well, and after the voting period closed November 5th, the votes were counted for all categories.

In the “Most Promising Open Source Project” Pimcore came first, with Tomato CMS coming second and BuddyPress third.

Other nominees in the category included WolfCMS and LiveStreet CMS.

“Pimcore is an exciting content management system framework which has great long-term prospects.

"The project is growing at a fast rate and has good support from its community,” added Marc Delisle, one of the judges for the 2010 Most Promising Open Source Project category. “

"Pimcore is an easy to use new solution and a high sense of professionalism can be found in everything from the project website to the documentation.”

As the winner, the Pimcore team won a prize of $2500, but the international recognition it will gain with this award will be worth a lot more. Second place will take home $1000, while third gets $500.

This is the first category winner announced for the 2010 Open Source Awards, a competition formerly known as the Open Source CMS Awards, held annually by the publishing giant, Packt.

Winners in other categories will be announced as the week goes on:

Monday: Most Promising Open Source category (Pimcore)

Tuesday: Open Source E-Commerce Applications category

Wednesday: Open Source Graphics Software category

Thursday: Open Source JavaScript Libraries category

Friday: Open Source CMS and Hall of Fame CMS categories

After testing Pimcore for our Softpedia Scripts Index, we highlight some of the great things about the up and coming CMS.

The Good:

Uses the Zend Framework under the hood. So you know you get rock-solid object-oriented programming.

For the frontend and user GUI, the developers opted for ExtJS, a modern cross-browser JavaScript library used also by other big industry names like Adobe or IBM.
Other well-established technologies used include jQuery and MySQL.

The Bad:

Small community automatically translates into a small plugin base. Unless the CMS is planning to include a huge array of features by default, this is a bad thing. Not tested on Windows.

Not for beginners or non-technical users. Being built on Zend that automatically implies advanced coding knowledge. Even with a friendly GUI, sometimes it just seems to advanced for a n00b or regular WordPress user.

The Truth:

Has a lot of possibilities. A long way from Drupal, Joomla or WordPress, but this comparison is out of line and not fare right now.

The backend works smooth, but you might need some real coding and structural knowledge when trying to use it. As the award name says, a very promising endeavor indeed. Should fit any website structure out there.

Check out some screenshots we made of Pimcore in action:



Download Pimcore from the Softpedia Scripts Index here.