Earlier today, Packt Publishing announced the winners of their 2008 Open Source CMS Most Valued People Award. The MVP is a new category for Packt's annual Open Source CMS Awards. In this category, "names were put forward by members of the Content Management System's development team and community and represent the exceptional support, guidance, and sheer amount of time that the MVPs have given up to support the development and growth of the respective CMS".
Instead of just copying the winners list from Packt's site, I had hoped to do something different here. I started with a goal to look for each of the MVP's personal blog or project site, I had hoped to find acknowledgments of the award was given by the MVP themselves or by someone else on their behalf. Evidently I started searching a little too early and I only came across mentions of the awards from three four of the projects: Drupal (Earl Miles), Joomla! (Johan Janssens), and XOOPS (Onakazu). Plus... Plone.
Below are some excerpts from or about these open source MVPs. If you are aware of more of the award winners recognizing or being recognized for their contributions...I would appreciate a link to the post. Open source contributors like these MVPs deserve all the recognition we can give them.
I'm honored to receive this award, but it's very important to remember that there isn't, really, a single Most Valuable Person in our community, but there are a lot of very valuable people in this community. I thank everyone who voted for me, and I thank everyone in the community who have made the way of life I currently lead even possible. Drupal is built upon the strength of this community, and I'm proud to be a part of it. More
I'm pleased to announce that our own Johan Janssens was selected for his work on Joomla by his community peers. Johan is one of the co-founders of Joomla, and has led the development of Joomla 1.5. Thanks to his efforts, Joomla has moved away from the spaghetti code it inherited from Mambo, and now has a super-flexible, object-oriented framework. With almost 3500 commits (aka code changes or additions in the code repository), Johan has written more Joomla than anyone else, and it's gonna take a while before anyone catches up. He's also a top 10 poster in the official Joomla forums.
Packt Publishing just announced the inaugural list of Most Valued People from Open Source Content Management Systems, and we are proud to have XOOPS' Founder, Onokazu, as one of them.
This is a new feature of the Open Source CMS Award and is designed to recognize the contributions to projects made by individuals that often go unnoticed.
Plone's super-contributor Martin Aspeli, aka "optilude," was recognized by Packt Publishing as one of the "Most Valued People" in open source content management systems.