The final result, as voted for by judges from The Open Source Collective, MySQL, the Eclipse Foundation, and 16,000 users on www.PacktPub.com [1] saw a tie for first place between Joomla! and Drupal. In the event of a tie, a fourth independent judge would be brought in. This was Apoorv Durga who is a member of CM Pros and runs his own blog [2] on portals and content management. This crucial vote ended up with Joomla! triumphing over Drupal by one point.
The final result was as follows:
- Joomla!- $5,000
- Drupal - $3,000
- Plone - $2,000
Choosing the top three proved to be a difficult experience for the judges, due to the quality of the finalists and their ability to suit different tasks depending on the objective of the user. "All the CMS’s that made the top 5 are very good" declared Scott Goodwin, representing The Open Source Collective, "and I wouldn't hesitate to use any of them depending on what I'm trying to accomplish."
The judges had strong compliments for all five finalists, with some of the highlights listed below:
Drupal
- Has been around for quite some time and is stable and actively developed
- Well coded and has an available granular permissions system and a strong eye for security
- Configuration was a breeze
- Lightweight installation
- Plethora of modules and themes
- Exceptional documentation and has an active and friendly community
- The node concept is very good
- Easy to setup and install
- Wide selection of themes and modules
- Provides lots of flexibility
- Backend seems well put together
- Drop down menu is a nice touch and is organized well
- Very easy to install and use with lots of extensions and modules
- The documentation is exhaustive and concise
- Admin user interface is intuitive and powerful
- The backend of Joomla! is very usable and the WYSIWYG editor the content was nice
- Seems like it would scale well and provides a lot of customization options
- Large and active community
- Very flexible and powerful
- Great user interface
- Very clean default installation
- Lots of addon modules
- Worth taking the steep learning curve
- Impressed with the customization it offers
- Integration with LDAP or other login systems is a plus
- Minimalist initial install
- Great community support
- Provides lots of addon modules and themes
- Lots of functionality
- Mature and has a very good permissions system
The lucky winner of the iPod Nano was Doug Tyree, from Sydney Australia. All visits to the site who voted for a CMS and completed the short survey were entered into a draw to win the iPod. Doug's name was selected at random from the list of entries.