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 PHP Open Source CMS was clearly my favorite because it is where we could have a clear competition between Joomla and Drupal, obvious category leaders in my opinion. In 2006, the award had been won by Joomla, what about 2007?
The total prize fund is $20 000 but for this category of BEST PHP OPEN SOURCE CMS only the winner of the five finalists gets $2000 and the other projects get nothing. Here are the results...
- Joomla www.Joomla.org
- Drupal www.Drupal.org
- e107 www.e107.org
CMS Made Simple www.cmsMadeSimple.org and PHP-Fusion www.PHP-Fusion.co.uk are also worth checking out since they were finalist projects in this category.
Joomla! is today revealed as the Award's third category winner, claiming Best Open Source PHP Content Management System. Last year's overall winner came out on top ahead of Drupal in second and e107 in third place and receives $2,000.
Joomla! is possibly one of the biggest success stories in open source of late. Its first release came in only September 2005 and since then has grown to be one of the most downloaded Content Management Systems on the web.
The judges noted a number of factors that helped Joomla! secure the Award. Most notably its good front-end for administrators and end-users, which gives users a simple and traditional company website straight out of the box. Once again, judges commented on the size and responsiveness of the community, which translates to potential problems being dealt with quickly.
Let me tell you that I disagree strongly with the judges, Drupal is clearly better than Joomla but once again like last year they gave the award to Joomla, this is so unfair! And let me tell you something, this whole award is total shit, why? Because of a rule they have setup and written very small which says that one CMS cannot win several categories, do you understand? Because Drupal won the overall best cms, it cannot win best php cms and best social networking cms, and that's the only reason why joomla and wordpress won those categories in front of Drupal... Now find another rule more stupid than this one? It makes people believe that joomla or wordpress are superior to Drupal when they're not!
But... congratulations to Joomla, the winning project of BEST PHP OPEN SOURCE CMS 2007!!!
Joomla's History
Joomla! is a continuation of the work of the Development Team which unanimously resigned from the Mambo project in August 2005. Celebrating its first birthday in September 2006, Joomla! has received 2.5 million downloads and is currently supported by a team of 19 developers. The name was chosen from thousands of recommendations by the community, and even went through an arduous review session by branding and marketing professionals who also felt that Joomla was the best choice of the lot. Joomla is a phonetic spelling for the Swahili word "Jumla", which means "all together" or "as a whole".
The Joomla! project has several Working Groups that have been created to utilise the wealth of knowledge our community provides. Each of these groups focuses on a specific aspect of Joomla! essential to the project's growth and development.
As it is neither possible or healthy for the core team to be involved in every discussion and conversation regarding Joomla! development and growth, these working groups are essential. With a leader or co-leader on the core team they have a built-in method of communication directly with the core team.
These working groups provide an essential communication channel between the community and the core team to bring concerns to light, advocate changes, and disseminate information.
Current release, Joomla 1.0.13 was released on 21 July 2007. Next version should be Joomla 1.5 and should be released within a week or so!
Drupal's History
Back in 2000, permanent Internet connections were at a premium for University of Antwerp students, so Dries Buytaert and Hans Snijder setup a wireless bridge between their student dorms to share Hans's ADSL modem connection among eight students. While this was an extremely luxurious situation at that time, something was missing. There was no means to discuss or share simple things.
This inspired Dries to work on a small news site with a built-in webboard, allowing the group of friends to leave each other notes about the status of the network, to announce where they were having dinner, or to share some noteworthy news items.
The software did not have a name until the day after Dries moved out after graduation. The group decided to put the internal website online so that they could stay in touch, continue to share interesting findings, and narrate snippets of their personal lives. While looking for an appropriate domain name, Dries settled for 'drop.org' after he made a typo to see if the the name 'dorp.org' was still available. Dorp is the Dutch word for 'village', which was considered an appropriate name for the small community.
Once established on the Web, drop.org's audience changed as the members began talking about new web technologies such as moderation, syndication, rating, and distributed authentication. Drop.org slowly turned into a personal experimentation environment, driven by the discussions and flow of ideas. The discussions about these web technologies were tried out on drop.org itself as new additions to the software running the site.
It was only later, in January 2001, that Dries decided to release the software behind drop.org as "Drupal." The motivating factor was to enable others to use and extend the experimentation platform so that more people could explore new paths for development. The name Drupal, pronounced "droo-puhl," is derived from the English pronunciation of the Dutch word "druppel" which stands for "drop."
Current release, Drupal 5.3 was released on 17 October 2007. Next version should be Drupal 6.0, due for the end of the year!
e107's History
jalist, the creator of e107 talks us through the history of the content management system:
I've never kept a journal or list of dates corresponding to e107's evolution, so all of the following is recounted from memory and is probably full of chronological errors
In late 1998, I coded and opened a website called Litestep2000 related to the Windows shell replacement Litestep. The site got fairly popular and a few months later became ls2k.org, when it moved to a php enabled server and I started my first tentative steps into scripting. After about 18 months of coding and maintaining this site, I was offered the chance by the then main admin c0mrade to take over the main Litestep theme site, litestep.net. I coded the site and I'm proud to say it continued to grow in popularity while I, DeViLbOi and jugg were at the helm.
Due to running such a busy site, I was always getting requests for site code, or portions of the code we used on litestep.net from other members of the Litestep community, but due to time restraints and real life, I was very rarely able to help, so I set about taking some of the code from litestep.net and ls2k.org and turning it into a more modular and distributable codebase.
Over the space of a couple of months, websites (mainly Litestep and shell related) started popping up, and feature requests started coming in, so I decided to get a domain and give the code a name. I settled on e107 as it was turning out to be my seventh main project, and I purchased e107.org and set up a small e107 powered website there.
The site opened in July 2002, and e107 was a couple of months old at that stage, and at version 2.1. I continued to code and release revisions until 5.4 when I decided on a version numbering change, and the next version released was 0.6, which saw a major revamp of the code. At this time new versions and revisions were coming out on almost a daily basis, imagine that :)
I was still maintaining the e107 codebase alone, but accepting contributions from users, notably McFly, Lolo_Irie, Cameron and a few others, but with version 0.612 I decided to ask a few of these contributors to join a newly formed development team, consisting of McFly, chavo, Cameron and Lolo_Irie, and myself. I was proud that these people accepting places as not only are they good coders, they were all good people as well, and still are :)
A couple of versions later, I decided to take a step back from the development side of e107, as maintaining what had in a short period become a quite popular system had taken it's toll on my real life, and I was not only tired but having to deal with the regular attacks on e107.org. The development team have continued to release new versions (at the time of writing e107 stands at v0.617) and make improvements and refine the e107 core.
I started tentative development of a new system in March 2004, codenamed nostromo. This isn't intended to replace e107 and will probably never see the light of day due to real life issues (again pfft). This code, or at least the site it produces, can be seen at my personal site jalist.com.
So there we have it, e107, due mainly to the work of the dev team, plugin coders and the people who selflessly and mostly thanklessly man the forums with support for less experienced users, has come a very long way in it's first two years of life, and hopefully will continue to grow for the next two years and beyond - my sincerest thanks to everyone that has contributed in even the smallest way.
Current release, e107 7.10 was released on 27 October 2007. Next version should be e107 7.11!
CMS Made Simple's History
CMS Made Simple provides a fast and easy way to create a web site and manage its contents. Use it to make a home page for your family -- or your multinational corporation! To get a site up with CMS Made Simple is just that, simple. For those with more advanced ambitions there are plenty of addons to download. And there is an excellent community always at your service. No question is too stupid to be asked!
It's very easy to add content and addons wherever you want them to appear on the site. Design your website in whatever way or style you want and just load it into CMSMS to get it in the air. Easy as that!
Current release, CMS Made Simple 1.2 was released on 16 October 2007. Next version should be CMS Made Simple 1.3!
PHP-Fusion's History
PHP-Fusion is a light-weight open-source content management system written and developed by Nick Jones in PHP. It uses a MySQL database to store a web site's content and comes with a simple but comprehensive administration system. PHP-Fusion includes features common in many other CMS packages.PHP-Fusion is now supported in more than twenty languages besides English. Each of them are hosted on national support sites that bring together tens of thousands of users world-wide. Further support sites are lining up for official recognition.
It is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License however, version 7 will be licensed under the Affero General Public License.
PHP-Fusion offers users the opportunity to expand the standard packages with so-called "infusions". These infusions can be easily uploaded, installed, and managed. There are a lot of infusions available, a reasonable amount has also been checked to work with PHP-Fusion and may thus be found in the official PHP-Fusion Mods Database. Next to infusions, there are mods, which mostly alter core code, and panels, which appear on either one of the side bars. These are both also widely available, and checked and posted in the PHP-Fusion Mods Database.
PHP-Fusion also offers to create themes and use them on their web site, without much hard work. There are two files, theme.php and styles.css, in which most of the theme can be defined and altered.
Current release, PHP-Fusion 6.01.12 was released on 16 October 2007. Next version should be PHP-Fusion 6.02!
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