This year, I was given the privilege of sitting on the judging panel for Packt Publishing's 2008 Most Promising Open Source CMS Award. Judges on the panel were required to select their top three CMS based on a number of factors including performance, usability, accessibility, ease of configuration and customization, scalability and security. These top three CMS were to originate from the five finalists in the most promising category which included: CMS Made Simple, ImpressCMS, MemHT Portal, MiaCMS, and SilverStripe.
As I promised earlier, I'm posting online my notes and comments on how I ranked all five finalists in the most promising category. For better or for worse, Packt Publishing also gives their judges a lot of flexibility in how they rank a CMS. While I wouldn't consider this a complete analysis of the CMS, it should provide enough information on the impression each CMS left me when reviewed. While the methodology for determining the best CMS may be subjective, I do try to design my ranking of the CMS to be fair and non-biased.
The order in which I ranked the top "most promising" CMS were:
- SilverStripe (my highest ranked)
- ImpressCMS
- CMS Made Simple
- MiaCMS
- MemHT Portal (my lowest ranked)
In order to come with the above rank, I chose to use factors such as performance, usability, accessibility, ease of configuration, ease of customization, scalability, the the amount of support/documentation offered through the project's site/infrastructure. I did not use security as a factor in my ranking. Since the CMS must be less than two years old to qualify in the most promising category, it seemed unfair to rank these CMS by security since by definition they're not fully matured projects.
