This week,
Packt Publishing has been announcing the winners of their 2009 open source CMS awards. Today they announced that Drupal was the first winner of a brand new category introduced this year: the Hall of Fame award. This new category featured a competition between Drupal and Joomla!, the previous winners of the Best CMS Award, an award neither is eligible for this year.
As a subset of this new award, Packt also announced the results of two new awards, recognizing specific contributions within the Drupal and Joomla! communities. Best Drupal Theme was won by a wide margin by Zen, and no real surprise there. Congratulations to Zen maintainer John Albin (JohnAlbin) and thanks for all your fantastic work. Best Drupal Module award was, again unsurprisingly, won by Views, with CCK a creditable second. Well done to Views maintainer Earl Miles (merlinofchaos) and thanks for the most incredible chunk of functionality I've ever used.
Earlier in the week Drupal also won the 2009 award for Best Open Source PHP CMS for the second year in a row. No surprise that Joomla! was in the mix and that the vote was close, but it is surprising that Drupal only narrowly beat out Wordpress. Of course there are a lot of really good reasons why Wordpress, excellent though it is, belongs in a different category to far more comprehensive CMSs like Drupal and Joomla!, and this is reflected in discussions on that thread. Both are excellent projects, but Wordpress is a great choice for simpler sites, but not for anything with even basic content/data complexity.
One final award that concerns Drupal is the Most Valued People from Open Source Content Management Systems award, and no surprise that Drupal founder Dries Buytaert (Dries) was Drupal's MVP.
In other awards Best Other Open Source CMS (i.e. non-PHP) was, for the second year in a row, won by Plone, a really excellent Python-based CMS. Runners up were dotCMS and mojoPortal. My own feeling is that Wordpress is the best option for simple sites, kind of a fourth Musketeer, with the Three Musketeers being Drupal, Joomla! and Plone, the latter being the best of the bunch for more complex sites and sites that need to evolve. All four are outstanding open source projects and powerful tools in the web developer's arsenal.
Most Promising Open Source CMS was won by ImpressCMS, with Pixie and Pligg tied for second. This is kind of like a Best Rookie award.
Tomorrow Packt will announce the winner for Best Overall Open Source CMS, the award won in 2007 and 2008 by Drupal and for which we were no longer eligible this year. Nominees are DotNetNuke, MODx, SilverStripe, WordPress and XOOPS and I would be stunned if Wordpress does not win that and I wonder if any debate with result from this.
See the overview of this year's awards for more information, including prize money, award details, runners up, etc. You can also see their list of previous award winners (Drupal won Best Overall and Best PHP in 2008 and Best Overall in 2007).