Packt Publishing today (14 November) announced Joomla! as the the winner of the 2006 Open Source Content Management System Award.

With 16,000 votes for more than 70 different Open Source Content Management Systems nominated for the award, Joomla! was judged winner of the final. After eight weeks of voting from visitors to www.PacktPub.com and judges from The Open Source Collective, MySQL, the Eclipse Foundation, and CMSPros, Joomla! triumphed with the most votes, winning $5,000.

Joomla! is the youngest CMS of the five finalists having originated by the then Mambo development team in August 2005. Joomla! was chosen due to its ease of installation and use along with the active development and community that supports the project.

Core team member Alex Kempkens said the award was a wonderful surprise. "I would personally like to thank Packt for their contribution to the Joomlasphere — by publishing Joomla! guides and by running such a successful competition," he said.

Alex added that Joomla's winning ways should also be attributed to the excellent work of Hagen Graf as author of the book published by Packt. "Open source software writing is not an easy task and I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Hagen and all of the other authors who contribute to publishers and make these books available for the community." 

Runners Up

Coming in a very close second place and collecting $3,000 is Drupal which was commended for its ease of use and exceptional documentation. In third place came Plone, who receive $2,000. Built on the Zope platform, Plone is very different to the other CMS’s in the top five and was noted for its steep learning curve. However it was praised by the judges for its power, flexibility, the customization it offered and its integration with LDAP.

Choosing the top three proved to be a difficult experience for the judges, due to the quality of the finalists and their ability to suit different tasks depending on the objective of the user. “All the CMS’s that made the top 5 are very good” declared Scott Goodwin, representing The Open Source Collective, “and I wouldn't hesitate to use any of them depending on what I'm trying to accomplish.”

The Award was designed by Packt to encourage, support, recognize and reward an Open Source Content Management System. The 2006 Award is the first of what is hoped will become an annual event for the company and the CMS community.

About Packt

Packt is a modern, unique publishing company with a focus on producing cutting-edge books for communities of developers, administrators, and newbies alike.

Packt’s books and publications share the experiences of fellow IT professionals in adapting and customizing today's systems, applications, and frameworks. Their solutions-based books give readers the knowledge and power to customize the software and technologies they’re using to get the job done.

Packt believes in Open Source. When they sell a book written on an Open Source project, they pay a royalty directly to that project. As a result of purchasing one of their open source books, Packt will have given some of the money received to that open source project.

For more information, please visit www.PacktPub.com or contact[at]packtpub.com