Packt Feedback

Stoyan Stefanov, one of Packt's judges, gives a high-level overview of how he saw the non-PHP systems stack up during this year's competition. His evaluation included these bullets:

• python
• slick and contemporary
• impressive list of add-ons
• excellent step-by-step tutorials, manuals and a free online book
• impressive client list, starting with (since I bitch about performance throughout this post) Akamai, the CDN provider
• +1 for performance best practices
• -10 for missing demo?

Obviously the missing demo didn't count too heavily against Plone, but it might be something that both the evangelism and hosting groups could look into.

Packt Best Other Open Source CMS Award

And the winner is... Plone!

For the second year running Plone makes it to the winner's circle and walks away with $2000. Second place went to dotCMS and third place to mojoPortal.

I still think the category should be Best Python Open Source CMS. Best Other OS CMS would then include PHP and dotNET frameworks. ;-)

Remember that this is much of a black box award, with community voting contributing to the nomination process and then final votes factoring in with Packt's judging panel in some mysterious way. None-the-less, I don't recommend that the Plone Foundation turn down the prize money.

Also remember that Packt is in the business of selling books and their judging panel would be foolish if they didn't take books sales into account. Right now their are four main Plone titles from Packt and a fifth expected any day now.

By comparison (hey, I've got to have some metrics in this post) Drupal and Joomla have 16 titles each, while WordPress only has 8.

Meanwhile Plonistas, kick back and have a well deserved cup o' joe (for those of us in the Western Hemisphere). The rest of you in Europe and Africa can go straight for other celebratory beverages. For Australia, New Zealand and the Far East, get out of bed and set off some fireworks!

Vote for Your CMS

This weekend's post will be a quick one... in Albuquerque its the beginning of the annual Balloon Fiesta. In about four hours we'll see many hundreds of balloons take to the air for the first of several mass ascensions.

Of interest this week is that the nominations are in for the Packt Open Source Awards. Plone made the finalist's circle. The short list of five "best other open source CMS" contenders includes:

• DotNetNuke
• dotCMS
• mojoPortal
• Plone
• WebGUI

By way of comparison, the PHP finalists are:

• Drupal
• Joomla
• MODx
• TYPOlight
• WordPress

And the overall finalists are:

• DotNetNuke
• MODx
• SilverStripe
• WordPress
• XOOPS

Its interesting that only DotNetNuke of the Other CMS category and MODx and WordPress of the PHP CMS group made it into the overall finalists. Drupal and Joomla appear have been promoted out of the overall category into the new Hall of Fame.

You can see that Packt is having to deal with a serious apples and oranges problem here, with .net solutions, blogging software, Perl, C#, Python, and J2EE systems in the mix. Although the Packt process is not particularly transparent, it does seem to be one that very roughly approximates how well particular communities can mobilize and get out the vote. To Open Source as a whole, its gratifying to see more than 12,000 votes in the nomination phase.

Voting is now open until October 30 so hop over and vote. Its worth $2000 to the Plone Foundation if it takes first place in its category.

Nominations Open Monday

Packt announced that nominations for their 2009 Open Source CMS Awards will open on Monday 3 August. Nominations continue through September 11 and final voting runs September 21 through October 30. The award winners will be announced November 9. The Packt OS CMS Awards are entering their fourth year and their process is still changing each year, but it seems to be stabilizing.

Get out their and mobilize your OS community. Plone has done well in the "Other CMS" category and has been a contender for best overall in past years. Placing well with the Packt Awards does give some nice publicity immediately on the tails of this year's World Plone Conference.

Drupal -- Plone -- DotNetNuke

I've been playing around with a logo for the blog and came up with this. It also might be useful for the Plone Metrics and Statistics group over at OpenPlans. It does occur to me that its a repurposing in part of the Plone logo, so I should check with the Plone Foundation about the proper way to handle this.

Today's topic is the Packt Publishing Awards now that the overall winners have been announced. Something doesn't seem quite right. The logic of the matter goes like this:

1. In the non-PHP category Plone was first, dotCMS was second, and DotNetNuke was third. Thus, Plone ranks higher than DotNetNuke.
2. In the PHP category, its Drupal > Joomla! > CMS Made Simple.
   
3. In the overall category, it turned out Drupal > Joomla! > DotNetNuke.

Hmm? Recall that Plone was a finalist in the overal category. Since from (1) above Plone ranked higher than DotNetNuke, one could infer that it should be somewhere to the left of DotNetNuke in (3). The question becomes, where did Plone end up in the overall category and why was it not ranked higher than DotNetNuke? Or put another way, why didn't DotNetNuke beat Plone for the non-PHP title?

Curious.

From the inconsistency in the results, we can't compare Plone with Drupal and Joomla!. How can Plone be ranked simultaneously both higher and lower than DotNetNuke?

The answer may lie in the fact that the Packt voting process separates the votes for each category. I would suggest that DotNetNuke fans voted well in the overall category and then forgot to punch in also for the non-PHP category. Does this mean DotNetNuke voters haven't noticed that their favorite CMS isn't PHP based? Or perhaps Plonistas only voted in the non-PHP category and didn't go to the overall section.

But then there's another factor at work here: Packt judges used an undisclosed method in addition to the popular vote to rank the contenders. I have no idea how number of Packt titles (Drupal 9, Joomla 9, DotNetNuke 3, Plone 3), sales figures, and so on might influence the judges. One might expect that the Packt Awards are foremost meant to benefit Packt by selling more books. In the absence of a public, objective methodology and with the inconsistent ranking of Plone and DotNetNuke, one can only guess.

Whatever the actual phenomenon, it points out that one can take these kinds of popularity contests only so far. Yes, we can now market Plone as the top non-PHP CMS for 2008 and that has a certain cachet. And I'll admit I was thrilled to see Tuesday's result roll in.

But deep down, it isn't popularity that should guide your software choices. True, highly popular systems will likely have more consultants, a larger professional base, and possibly a longer useful life. But that doesn't guarantee that the popular use-case is going to match your use-case. Other requirements need to be factored in--your internal support capabilities, deployment platform, user environment, security, overall goals, and many other needs.

In my case, our predisposition for Python and the need for a secure system were the key factors that drove us to Plone. The National Vulnerability Database lists ten records for Plone over the last three years. Drupal shows 158 records; Joomla! 265. Or put another way, "...it's striking that three [Drupal, Joomla!, Wordpress] of the Top Ten contenders on IBM's security worry-list have PHP in common. You can read whatever you want to into that, I suppose." (Kas Thomas, 8/2008)

For me, that's the end of the voting.

Plone Takes Packt Prize

Plone has taken top honors in Packt Publishing's 2008 Best Other Open Source CMS category. "Other" refers to non-PHP CMS. Extensibility, support for non-functional requirements, and ease of setup were key to Plone's success.

Plone surpassed the other finalists, dotCMS, DotNetNuke, mojoPortal, and Umbraco, to come away with a $2000 first prize. Thank you, Packt!

The overall CMS winner will be announced this Friday Oct. 31 (Halloween).

Vote for Plone

Vote for Plone in the Best Other Open Source CMS category of the Packt Publishing CMS Awards. Although its a non-scientific poll, Packt's results do get some press every year. Its probably more important to vote in the nomination rounds earlier in the year to make sure that Plone makes it into all appropriate categories. Voting runs until Friday October 26, so hop on it.