If you're in the market for a content management system (and an open-source one to boot), you might be interested to know that the Packt's Open Source Content Management System (CMS) Award (very prestigious in CMS circle) was given to Drupal in the overall category, collecting a first prize of $5,000.
Drupal finished ahead of Joomla! and DotNetNuke. The open-source platform has grown substantially by all accounts of late, downloaded almost 1.5 million times in the last 12 months. It is currently being applied by companies such as Warner Brothers Music, MTV UK, and the New York Observer amongst others.
Finishing in second place and receiving $3,000 was Joomla!, the youngest of the three finalists and a previous winner of the Overall Award. Judges were impressed with Joomla's ease of installation and ability to get a website up-and-running in a short space of time. Particular praise was reserved for its sizeable and enthusiastic community, which has allowed the project to grow so quickly in such a short space of time. In third place and receiving $2,000 was DotNetNuke, the only CMS in the final that is written in VB.NET for the ASP.NET framework. DotNetNuke received positive feedback from judges who were impressed with its ease of development and security implementation features.
The most promising CMS system was SilverStripe. SilverStripe is today exclusively revealed as the winner of the 2008 Most Promising Open Source Content Management System. The SilverStripe project received $2,000, holding off strong competition from CMS Made Simple in the first runner up position with ImpressCMS and MiaCMS finishing joint second runner up.