Drupal won both the Best PHP Open Source CMS category and the Overall 2008 Open Source CMS Award from the Packt Open Source Content Management System Award!

Check the news here : www.packtpub.com/award

This is great news because my blog and lots of my websites are made with Drupal and I'm everyday happier not to have chosen Joomla when I was still evaluating both and hesitating.

I'm happy that finally Drupal 6 is out, about a month after Joomla 1.5 has been released.

After one year of development we are ready to release Drupal 6.0 to the world. Thanks to the tireless work of the Drupal community, over 1,600 issues have been resolved during the Drupal 6.0 release cycle. These changes are evident in Drupal 6's major usability improvements, security and maintainability advancements, friendlier installer, and expanded development framework. Further, from bug fix to feature request, these issues follow-through on the Drupal project's continued commitment to deliver flexibility and power to themers and developers.

It was a rather long wait since last summer I was expecting Drupal 6 before the end of the year, but now it's done... I only have a dozen sites worth upgrading to do!

You don't understand the above sentence? Hahaha! If there are some words you don't get I'll explain briefly, but if you get all the sentence's words then you might want to try Drigg right now on a new Drupal install...

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...

1. Joomla www.Joomla.org
2. Drupal www.Drupal.org
3. 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!!!

Integrating GetResponse autoresponder with Joomla CMS will definitively be trickier than integrating AWeber because it seems there's way less material covering GetResponse integration in general, including on their own site and support forums. There is no API or database integration. There are settings where you can email to a specific email (e.g. subscribeme@yoursite.com) and get added though which could probably be leveraged to achieve this.

Ideally, when a new member subscribe to your Joomla site, he would then be subscribed to one of your lists (or at least a confirmation email from GetResponse should be sent to his email address) and then later on he would have the choice of subscribing to more lists directly from your Joomla site.

Well, it's definitively not that simple, here's what I've found:

When I read forums, sometimes I see people asking for advice on which CMS would be adapted for their particular project, and often there are replies of what looks like Joomla fanatics who answer without any argument that Joomla is the best CMS.

I can't stand it because I know it's wrong, but then I'm not paid to promote any particular CMS nor am I paid by the original poster to convince him to choose the best solution for his project. Because let's be real here, for most common uses, from people who have no experience of CMS, Joomla will do the job as well as a number of other CMS solutions!