Packt Publishing is geared toward the Open source software community. A large part of that community is Open Source content management systems. Packt has now has an award for the best CMS as judged by a panel of three.

The Top Five

I do not agree wholly with the selection process of the top five CMS's. Public voting only pits the communites of one CMS against the others. This is not a proper way of picking candidates for an award that will have any meaning. The public will always be questioning the fact that a CMS with exceptional presentation in all categories was never choosen because it has quiet or benign community. Examples of this would be Typo3, Mambo and OpenCMS which did not make it to the top five but are no less popular or of less quality than the choosen five. They just have do not have a verbal web community.

• Drupal
• e107
• Joomla!
• Plone
• Xoops

Award Rules

1. Only nominations for open source Content Management Systems will be counted
2. Only one nomination per person will be counted
3. The five open source Content Management Systems with the most nominations will go through to the final
4. The top three will be voted for by a panel of three judges. A final fourth vote will come from the results of a public vote on www.PacktPub.com.
5. All three judges are independent and their decision is final
6. The winning CMS will get US $5,000, the second will get US $3,000 and the third placed finalist will get US $2,000.
7. Packt Publishing has no influence, input or say in the final five or winner of the Award
   
   

The judges

The Judges will be choosing from the five Content Management Systems that received the most nominations, during the nomination stage. They will be selecting their top three based on a number of factors including performance, usability, accessibility, ease of configuration and customization, scalability and security.

The judges are renowned in the world of Open Source software. They are:

• Scott Goodwin - Open Source Collective, Inc
• Lenz Grimmer - MySQL AB
• Nathan Gervais - Eclipse Foundation

Critique

I am a bit sceptical when it comes to the judges that do not readily appear to be known for their work in the areas that the CMS's will be judged on. I am even more sceptical of the fact that the award winner may be based on popularity and community participation. In my eyes this makes the award more of a beauty pageant or "American Idol" that an actual aknowledgement of some high acheivement.

I had hoped that Packt would publish more on the criteria of how a CMS would be judged. What are the tests that will be given? How much does the voting of individuals weigh? Given that there are four judges, including the public vote, it could go 50/50 without a deciding vote. What happens if the public vote is for a CMS that is not choosen by any of the judges? This could get messy.

The size and participation of a CMS community does not make one CMS better than another. Packt Publishing might want to be careful of this type of award in the future. They might possibly want to change the criteria completely for the next go around. To be fair this award should have been named "Most Popular Open Source CMS Community". While Packt shows seriousness in giving out a great deal of money the award itself does not seem like one to be taken seriously.

Happy Publishing!

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