The Packt Open Source Content Management System Award 2007 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 the Packt website which has been promoted by the different open source projects communities. This category of Best Other Open Source CMS means "other than PHP" so this year's finalist projects have been developed in C#, JAVA, PYTHON programming languages.
The total prize fund is $20 000 but for this category of BEST OTHER OPEN SOURCE CMS only the winner of the five finalists gets $2000 and the other projects get nothing. Here are the results...
- mojoPortal www.mojoPortal.com
- Plone www.Plone.org
- Silva www.infrae.com/products/silva
OpenEdit www.OpenEdit.org and OpenCms www.OpenCms.org are also worth checking out since they were finalist projects in this category.
Packt can exclusively reveal the second category winner of the Open Source Content Management System Award as mojoPortal, winning Best Other Open Source CMS. In another tight category, mojoPortal came out ahead of Plone and Silva who came second and third respectively.
With PHP/MySQL Content Management Systems dominating the 2006 Awards, it was decided that setting up a category for CMS's written in other languages would be an important addition for 2007. This has enabled us to present and give extra recognition to the plethora of non PHP/MySQL CMS's that are available. This was backed up by the judges who noted the quality of all five finalists and how difficult the job of selecting a top three was.
The judges agreed that mojoPortal's ease of use, set of relevant tools and plugins and also the fact that it is cross platform, made it stand out above the rest. On hearing the news, Joe Audette, the founder, leader and primary developer of mojoPortal was predictably pleased. "The mojoPortal team is very happy to be honored with this award. We are working very hard to continuously improve mojoPortal and will use the award money to fund the completion of our e-commerce feature" he explained. "We'd like to thank our community members and the judges for helping us achieve this recognition and we'd like to thank Packt Publishing for the additional attention to our project which has resulted from this contest and award" Audette concludes.
Congratulations to mojoPortal, the winning project of BEST OTHER OPEN SOURCE CMS 2007!!!
mojoPortal's History
When you need to build a web application you usually have some business functionality in mind but there is always a certain amount of web plumbing that needs to be implemented for things like navigation, authentication of users, security and roles and other things that are needed to support most kinds of business application logic.
After building many web applications you realize that a certain amount of this plumbing you are having to write over and over for each project. Most projects don't allocate much development time for these things and you end up doing things the quick way rather than the best way. Business stakeholders often can't be bothered with the technical details, they want to see results quickly and they tend to judge the success of the product/project by how attractive the user interface is. So the developers are really the only ones who are going to notice the elegant design of the plumbing and often enough little emphasis is put on the elegance of the design.
Many projects that don't spend time making sure the plumbing is elegant later find as the project grows in size the ugliness of the plumbing becomes more apparent and more difficult to put right because too many things are hard coded or cobbled together differently in different places. When projects get really messy, making small changes in one place end up causing unintended side effects or bugs in other places.
If you build on mojoPortal you are starting out with a core framework where great care has been put into making the plumbing elegant and efficient and easy to understand for the average .NET developer. It has been developed/managed by Joe Audette, MCSD, MCDBA, MCSE, under peer review provided by the open source community, starting in 2004. Since this plumbing is already built for you, you don't have to spend any time developing it yourself so you can get quick results by starting right in on your specific application logic.
You can think of mojoPortal as a Starter Kit for Advanced ASP.NET Web Sites and Portals.
Out of the box, mojoPortal provides dynamic database driven web site(s) with an XHTML compliant Content Management System and community features like Blogs, Forums, Image Galleries, etc.
Current release, mojoPortal 2.2.3.9 was released on 26 September 2007. Next version should be mojoPortal 2.2.4 or 2.3 since it is already overdue!
Plone's History
The Plone project was started in 1999 by Alan Runyan, Alexander Limi, and Vidar Andersen. It has quickly grown into one of the most popular and powerful open-source content management systems in the world. In 2004, the Plone Foundation was formed to handle development, marketing, and legal issues for the roughly 100 developers that make up the Plone Team. The Plone community has hosted a conference every year since 2003; this year it was held in Naples, Italy.Plone is a content management framework that works hand-in-hand and sits on top of Zope, a widely-used Open Source web application server and development system. To use Plone, you don't need to learn anything about Zope, however to develop new Plone content types, a small amount of Zope knowledge is helpful.
Plone is built from the ground up with focus on internationalization (over 35 translations are currently available) and accessibility for sight and motor impaired individuals.
Zope itself is written in Python, an easy-to-learn, widely-used and supported Open Source programming language. Python can be used to add new features to Plone, and used to understand or make changes to the way that Zope and Plone work.
By default, Plone stores its contents in Zope's built in transactional object database, the ZODB. There are products and techniques, however, to share information with other sources if required, such as relational databases, LDAP, filesystem files, etc.
Plone runs on Windows, Linux, BSD, Mac OS X, and many other platforms; "everything included" installers are available for Windows and Mac OS X, and RPM packages are available for Linux, as well as being available in the packaging systems of most Linux distributions.
Current release, Plone 3.0.2 was released on 25 October 2007. Next version should be Plone 3.1!
Silva's History
Silva is an open source CMS in use at many institutions, primarily in Europe, but also in the US and Australia. It's a powerful solution for organizations that manage complex websites. Content is stored in clean and futureproof XML, independent of layout and presentation. Features include versioning, workflow system, integral visual editor (Kupu), content reuse, sophisticated access control, multi-site management, extensive import/export facilities, fine-grained templating, and hi-res image storage and manipulation.
Development of Silva began in 2001. Through the support and contributions of many developers it's grown into a robust and stable content management system, especially suitable for use at hierarchical organizations. Today Silva is highly scalable, serving websites with millions of pieces of content and running in clusters that host 350+ Silva sites.
The initial funding for development came from Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Other investors quickly followed, such as the visionary ETH Zurich in Switzerland (the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien (the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration), the University of Bedfordshire in the UK, and many others.
Silva is built upon the advanced Zope application server which offers a through-the-web management interface, a flexible templating language, relational database integration besides its built-in object database, security infrastructure, XML support, extensibility with new components, scalability through clustering, and many other things. Zope and Silva are written in Python.
Current release, Silva 2.0.1 was released on 25 October 2007. Next version should be Silva 2.0.2!
OpenEdit's History
OpenEdit is an open source content management system made for web professionals.
The first version of OpenEdit was created in 2001. Over the years OpenEdit was refined and installed for dozen of projects on behanf of several marketing firms. Each project used agile technology to make sure that the product was flexible and easy to work with. OpenEdit proved itself with a 100% success rate even on low budget projects.
In 2005, Christopher Burkey invested everything into OpenEdit. Christophers goal is to make web site creation better so designers can create amazing web sites.
OpenEdit is a one stop, full featured, full service, content management system that supports fast deployments of multiple web sites. A web site built using OpenEdit will meet the needs of your clients.An 'out-of-the-box' deployment provides web designers with a solution that can be quickly customized to meet each site owner's online requirements. Built in features of all OpenEdit sites include eCommerce, Blog, Content Management with online editing, Photo Gallery / Image Archiving, Members only section, and more. The list of technologies provided with each deployment is quite remarkable, especially considering there are no licensing fees.
No other tool is as fast, easy to use, and as focused on your clients needs as OpenEdit.
Current release, OpenEdit 5.622 was released on 23 September 2007. Next version should be OpenEdit 5.7!
OpenCms's History
OpenCms from Alkacon Software is a professional, easy to use website content management system in Open Source development since 2000. OpenCms helps content managers worldwide to create and maintain beautiful websites fast and efficiently.
The fully browser based user interface features configurable editors for structured content with well defined fields. Alternatively, content can be created using an integrated WYSIWYG editor similar to well known office applications. A sophisticated template engine enforces a site-wide corporate layout and W3C standard compliance for all content.
OpenCms is based on Java and XML technology. It can be deployed in an open source environment (e.g. Linux, Apache, Tomcat, MySQL) as well as on commercial components (e.g. Windows NT, IIS, BEA Weblogic, Oracle).
As true open source software, OpenCms is free of licensing costs.
Current release, OpenCms 7.0.2 was released on 12 September 2007. Next version should be OpenCms 7.1!
Please write something in the box below, a comment, a question, anything at all. You can even post links I don't mind at all. But please post something. If you leave this page without writing anything all your beloved ones will die instantly. Come on, don't be a rat, write something. I'll even give you money, and lot of it! You can do it, if you don't do it for me, do it for someone else, anybody, I don't care, could be for Obama or for the pope, but do it NOW before it's too late! Please, pretty please?