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 is very nice of Packt to reward open source projects and in my opinion Drupal is the best of all, it has been the most useful piece of software for me so far in my money making journey on the web, soif it depended only on me it should be the overall winner of this friendly competition as well as the winner in the two categories in which it is a finalist.

Packt is pleased to reveal that WordPress is the first winner of the 2007 Open Source CMS Award, picking up the best Open Source Social Networking Content Management System. In a very close category, WordPress came out in front of Elgg and Drupal, who finished joint second.

In what is one of the new categories for 2007, the Open Source Social Networking CMS Award was designed to recognise Content Management Systems that promoted the collaboration and distribution of information and development of communities. The Judges commented on WordPress's ease of configuration, professional approach, usability and enthusiastic community. Along with the title, WordPress will receive $2,000 in prize money from Packt.

With the judges choosing and internauts contributing their top three choices, Elgg and Drupal ended up on the same number of votes in joint second. Judges praised Elgg as a true Open Source Social Networking CMS, its variety of themes and overall user experience. Drupal had a long list of positive comments from the judges and was praised as a good overall package.

The total prize fund is $20 000 but for this category of BEST SOCIAL NETWORKING OPEN SOURCE CMS only the winner of the five finalists gets $2000 and the other projects get nothing. Here are the results...

1. WordPress www.WordPress.org
2. Drupal www.Drupal.org, Elgg www.Elgg.org

LifeType www.LifeType.net and Moodle www.Moodle.org didn't make it to the top 3 but are worth checking out too since they were finalist projects...

Congratulations to WordPress, the winning project of BEST SOCIAL NETWORKING CMS 2007!!!

WordPress's History

WordPress is a blog publishing system written in PHP and backed by a MySQL database. WordPress is the official successor of b2cafelog, developed by Michel Valdrighi. The name WordPress was suggested by Christine Selleck, a friend of lead developer Matt Mullenweg.

b2cafelog, more commonly known as simply b2 or cafelog was the precursor to WordPress. b2cafelog was estimated to have been employed on approximately 2000 blogs as of May 2003. It was also written in PHP for use with MySQL by Michel Valdrighi, who is now a contributing developer to WordPress. Though WordPress is the official successor, another project, b2evolution, is also in active development.

WordPress first appeared in 2003 as a joint effort between Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little to create a fork of b2. In 2004 the licensing terms for the competing Movable Type package was changed by Six Apart, and many of its users migrated to WordPress - causing a marked, and continuing, growth in WordPress's popularity.

WordPress releases are named after well known jazz musicians. WordPress 1.0 was codenamed Mingus (after Charles Mingus). WordPress 1.5 was released mid-February 2005 and codenamed Strayhorn after Billy Strayhorn. It added a range of new vital features. One such is being able to manage static pages. This allows content pages to be created and managed outside the normal blog chronology and has been the first step away from being simple blog management software to becoming a full content management system. Another is the new template/theme system, which allows users to easily activate and deactivate "skins" for their sites. WordPress was also equipped with a new default template (codenamed Kubrick after the late Stanley Kubrick) designed by Michael Heilemann.

WordPress 2.0 was released in December 2005 and codenamed Duke after jazz pianist and composer Duke Ellington. This version added rich editing, better administration tools, image uploading, faster posting, an improved import system, and completely overhauled the back end. WordPress 2.0 also offered various improvements to plugin developers.

On 22 January 2007, another major upgrade, WordPress 2.1, codenamed Ella after jazz vocalist Ella Fitzgerald, was released. In addition to correcting security issues, version 2.1 featured a redesigned interface and enhanced editing tools (including integrated spell check and auto save), improved content management options, and a variety of code and database optimizations.

WordPress 2.2, codenamed Getz after tenor saxophonist Stan Getz, was released on 16 May 2007. Version 2.2 featured widget support for templates, updated Atom feed support, and speed optimizations. Wordpress 2.2 was initially slated to have a revised taxonomy system for categories, as well as tags, but a proposed revision led to the feature being held back from release.

Current release, WordPress 2.3.1 was released on 26 October 2007. Next version should be WordPress 2.4!

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!

Elgg's History

Elgg is an open-source social networking platform. It offers blogging, networking, community, collecting of news using feeds aggregation and file sharing features. Everything can be shared among users with access controls and everything can be cataloged by tags as well.

Current release, Elgg 0.8 was released on 6 July 2007. Next version should be Elgg 0.9!

LifeType's History

The LifeType project started in February 2003 when its leader, Oscar Renalias, needed a set of dynamic scripts for his personal web page. Even though he did not know about the idea of weblogs back then, the outcome of the first iteration of the project already resembled one. A few weeks later Francesc, another one of the founding members, suggested that developing a blog with support for multiple users and blogs could be a better idea, and so pLog 0.1 was released on the 2nd of September 2003 featuring most of the features that are still part of the core features nowadays: multi-user and multi-blog from the ground up, template engine, localizable and extensible via plugins. pLog 0.2 was released on the 9th of November, sporting new search engine-friendly URLS, speed improvements, a better plugin interface and changes in the administration interface. At this point is where pLog started to gather some interest from the community and when pLog 0.3 was released later on March 2004, it was warmly received by the community: it still is the most downloaded pLog/LifeType release ever. pLog 0.3 introduced the concept of "resources" and the integration of media files with articles, time differences, an integrated RSS parser and a Bayesian anti spam filter.

Relationship between LifeType and pLog

Amazon.com has been holding the "plog" trademark much longer than the project has been around, so the project was kindly asked to change its name.

On behalf of the LifeType project, we would like to thank the attitude of Amazon.com towards the LifeType project. Where others would have decided to sue an open source project, Amazon.com decided to work together with us so that we could find a solution that would suit all of us. And this is how the pLog project became the LifeType project.

LifeType 1.0 was released in April 2005, with LifeType 1.0.6 being the last maintenance release of the 1.0.x branch in June 2006. LifeType 1.0 marked the beginning of a new era for LifeType, with a modernized user interface and plenty of exciting features for bloggers. Lifetype 1.2 was released on the 20th of March 2007 and brought a new fine-grained permission framework, performance improvements when serving files and plenty of other performance improvements.

Current release, LifeType 1.2.4 was released on 17 July 2007. Next version should be LifeType 1.2.5!

Moodle's History

Moodle is a course management system (CMS) - a free, Open Source software package designed using sound pedagogical principles, to help educators create effective online learning communities. You can download and use it on any computer you have handy (including webhosts), yet it can scale from a single-teacher site to a 50,000-student University.
Moodle was the creation of Martin Dougiamas, a former WebCT administrator at Curtin University, with graduate degrees in Computer Science and Education. Martin's later Ph.D. studies examined "The use of Open Source software to support a social constructionist epistemology of teaching and learning within Internet-based communities of reflective inquiry" and this research has strongly influenced some of the design of Moodle, providing pedagogical aspects missing from many other e-learning platforms.

The word Moodle is actually an acronym for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment, although originally the M stood for "Martin", named after Martin Dougiamas.

Moodle can also be considered a verb, which describes the improvisational process of doing things as it occurs to you to do them, an enjoyable tinkering that often leads to insight and creativity. As such it applies both to the way Moodle was developed, and to the way a student or teacher might approach studying or teaching an online course.

Moodle has a significant user base with 18,204 registered sites with 7,270,260 users in 712,531 courses (as of November 15, 2006). More than 70 languages are supported.

There are 152 registered Moodle sites that are larger than 5,000 users. The site with the most users is moodle.org with 40 courses and 123,254 users. The site with the most courses is Online Campus with 8,282 courses and 54,955 users (as of August 2, 2006).

Moodle market share according to Alexa Web Traffic for LMS Suppliers: Moodle only below Blackboard, above all other VLE, including WebCT.

Current release, LifeType 1.2.4 was released in July 2007. Next version should be LifeType 1.2.5!