Vote for the Best Open Source CMS

Everybody likes award ceremonies, especially those in which regular people vote for the winner. Maybe this is the reason why the Packt Open Source CMS Award has managed to consolidate itself as a realistic and meaningful prize for the best open source CMSs around. After a month-long open nomination process, voting has started for the greatest open source CMS of 2009.

Packt has released its nominations for five categories related to the field of open source CMS development. The voting process is opened to the public, and if the visitor has time to fill in a survey, they could be eligible to win one of three iPod touch players from Packt.

The list is as follows:

Best Overall Open Source CMS
SilverStripe – Download from Softpedia
MODx - Download from Softpedia
DotNetNuke - Download from Softpedia
XOOPS - Download from Softpedia
WordPress - Download from Softpedia

Most Promising Open Source CMS
Manhali - Download from Softpedia
Pixie - Download from Softpedia
Pligg - Download from Softpedia
ImpressCMS - Download from Softpedia
RedaxScript - Download from Softpedia

Best Open Source PHP CMS
Joomla! - Download from Softpedia
WordPress - Download from Softpedia
MODx - Download from Softpedia
Drupal - Download from Softpedia
TYPOlight - Download from Softpedia

Best Other Open Source Award
dotCMS - Download from Softpedia
Plone - Download from Softpedia
WebGUI - Download from Softpedia
mojoPortal - Download from Softpedia
DotNetNuke - Download from Softpedia.

There are also two Hall of Fame Awards given to themes and extension developers for Joomla! and Drupal, the most acclaimed and renowned CMSs around. Not just open source.

Past winners of these awards include, besides the above mentioned Drupal and Joomla, CMSs, SilverStripe, Plone, MODx, mojoPortal and WordPress.

To prevent bot voting, a panel of judges formed of experts and publishers in various CMS-related fields will also contribute to choosing the winners. The panel features some big names in application development, including the likes of John Resig (jQuery creator and Mozilla developer), Manuel Lemos (creator and developer on PHPClasses), Stoyan Stefanov (Yahoo! and Zend developer) and Marc Delisle (phpMyAdmin developer).

For those interested, votes can be submitted on this page until October 30, 2009.

An editorial by one of the testers from the Scripts section on Softpedia will be available soon on this subject with a more insightful analysis and conclusions.