Every year Packt Publishing, a tech book publisher, runs a global award for the best open source CMS. In 2009, SilverStripe had its best result yet.
The Packt CMS Award is a major award: many thousands of people around the world rate their favourite CMS, before judges thoroughly evaluate the most popularly voted software. There is no more significant worldwide competition that rates open source or proprietary content management platforms, so we're very proud of our year-on-year progress:
- 2007: Finalist (Top 5) in 'Most Promising' (Products under 2 years old) category
- 2008: Winner of 'Most Promising' category (USD2000 prize)
- 2009: Finalist (Top 3) in 'Best Overall CMS', a highly competitive category (USD2000 prize)
Judges of the award announced WordPress as the 2009 winner, rating SilverStripe second, tied with Modx. Damian Carville, Marketing Manager at Packt Publishing, said SilverStripe received 17% of the 23,000 public votes. This number is significant when you consider that there were 5 finalists, and some finalists such as WordPress and DotNetNuke have significantly older and thus larger communities who can vote. To be a finalist, SilverStripe had to gain public support in the form of nominations, and beat out dozens of other nominated products.
We asked the judges to offer feedback on what they rated as the strengths of our software and what their overall view of our software was. We also asked, if they were in the position of managing our software, what they would focus on adding or improving. Bryan Ruby from CMS Report.com responded to our request in a public blog post, and said the following about SilverStripe:
I mentioned at the start of this review that you can't choose a CMS solely on the criteria but also on how well it meets your project requirements. For the CMS projects that I'm routinely involved with, SilverStripe would likely be my first choice of the five CMS finalists in this category. My placement of SilverStripe in the number three spot is likely more a reflection that both WordPress and DotNetNuke are more mature applications and SilverStripe is still needing some room to grow as a full featured application.
Although SilverStripe is one of the youngest open source projects among the finalists, the availability of relevant documentation on its website scored high with me. The SilverStripe community has done a great job in mixing text, videos, and graphics to provide quality documentation that can't be matched by many of the open source projects I visit on a regular basis. If you take a deeper look into SilverStripe, you'll also find that SilverStripe also scores well in ease of installation, customization, and usability.
The one area where I thought SilverStripe could improve was in the availability of themes and perhaps even the quantity of available modules. Again though, SilverStripe's project community is still relatively young and with time there should be no doubt we'll be seeing a continued increase of themes and modules made available for SilverStripe.
Ease of Installation 4 Ease of Use (Usability) 4 Documentation on project's website 5 Scalability (extension/plugins) 4 Availability of themes 3 Security measures 4 Performance 4 Ease of Customization 4 Total Points 31
We'd like to thank the judges for their time and Packt Publishing for running the awards. We're also grateful to Packt for the $2000 prize - this will be spent on furthering our open source software. Lastly, and importantly, we'd like to thank our user and developer community for voting for us!
