Packt Publishing today announced that Drupal has won the Overall 2007 Open Source CMS Award. With 18,000 votes on Packt’s website, coupled with the expert opinions from a panel of judges, Drupal succeeds Joomla! as the overall winner.

Initially released in 2001, Drupal is one of the most downloaded Open Source Content Management Systems with one of the most enthusiastic and committed communities. "This is a great honor for the Drupal community and the thousands of individual developers who’ve contributed to the project" confirms Drupal developer and core contributor Jeff Eaton. "We’ve worked hard to make Drupal as flexible, as scalable, and as accessible as possible. It’s a great week for all of Open Source; the winners in every category have shown that OSS can produce powerful solutions for a wide range of needs" he concludes.

Winners in the other final categories include:

• Most Promising: MODx
• Best Open Source PHP: Joomla!
• Best non PHP Open Source CMS: mojoPortal
• Best Social Networking: WordPress

The Awards were designed to recognize and reward Open Source CMS’s for their consistently high standards in what is an extremely competitive field. The result of this year’s Award confirms this quality and also suggests that there isn’t necessarily one CMS that is the best, more that there is the best one to fit an individual user’s needs and requirements.   

Full results of the Overall 2007 Open Source CMS Award 

There’s no silver bullet for web based content management system (CMS) ! Instead of building a new CMS, I wanted to work on an open source CMS. So, I don’t need to spend days and nights to build features around the system. I have evaluated over dozens of open source CMSs such as Drupal, Joomla, Mambo, Xoops, MODx, PHP-Nuke, PostNuke, SimpleCMS, CMS Mades Simple, Typo3, WordPress etc. Yet, it is extremely difficult for me to choose from one of them. Many times, I wanted to build a new CMS that customized for my needs.

Yeah, I built a web based CMS for Computerworld and PCWorld back in 1999 when I was working for IDG Hong Kong. It’s highly customized for online publish using ASP and SQL Server. I built the system from scratch in 3 months myself with the implementation of software and hardware architecture. I named the system "WebPub". The features of the system include article management, categorization, user management, access permission, newsletter subscription, online polling and front page management etc. In addtion, it supports Chinese or double-byte characters as we publish titles in Chinese as well. Following is a screen shot of the system.

  
WebPub 2.0

Easy of use or user friendly, shorter learning curve, flexible, extensible and community support are main criteria for me to evaluate a CMS. Most importantly, search engine (SEO) friendly and multi-languages support (I18N) are essential factors. Because, being indexed by Google and major search engines and ranked on top of the search engine result page (SERP) are vital for today’s web sites - it means business. And this is one of my goals for my clients at work.

After comprehensive evaluation and comparison,  I decided to go with Drupal. Because Drupal provides clean URL or user friendly URL through Apache’s mod_rewrite and support for multi-languages or translation. The learning curve for studying the Drupal API is relatively short and easy to learn. However, it’s not as easy as osCommerce – a robust open source ecommerce system for online stores, which I have worked on since 2003. Still, I can master Drupal in a few weeks. it gives me more time to build solutions on it rather than coding on a core system for a new system. Even people at IBM are using the same aproach to building solutions, Using open source software to design, develop, and deploy a collaborative Web site http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/ibm/library/i-osource1.

My first Drupal site is the company site for Affine Communications Inc., which is optimized for SEO purpose. I will build more solutions based on Drupal.