MODX

After four years, WordPress has finally earned respect from the judges in Packt Publishing's 2009 Open Source CMS Award. WordPress has won the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award and is finally being recognized for its evolution from a blogging application to a full fledged Web content management system. Packt also declared MODx and SilverStripe tied for the first runner up position in this award.

We are pleased to announce that WordPress has won the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. WordPress has won this Award for the first time in the past four years, earning itself a place in the Hall of Fame category for the Award next year.

While WordPress occupied the top spot in the Overall Award, the other two extremely popular finalists MODx and SilverStripe tied for the first runner up position. After Pixie and Pligg sharing a similar result for the Most Promising CMS category, this is the second time the combined opinion of judges and the public was evenly divided for two CMSes, awarding each of them a first runner up spot.

It is important to note that neither Drupal nor Joomla! competed in the Overall Best category as previous winners in this category compete in the Hall of Fame category. This year, Drupal out competed Joomla! in both the Hall of Fame category as well as the Best Open Source PHP CMS category. Joomla! may be out of luck this year but you surely can't count them out as the upcoming Joomla! 1.6 version should keep them competitive for next year. With three CMS now included in the Hall of Fame it should be an interesting rivalry between the three in 2010.

Some personal notes about the 2009 winners: As one of the judges for the Overall Best Open Source CMS, I too thought WordPress earned the spot for first place. However, I thought DotNetDuke should have been a runner up as I was impressed with it from a usability perspective. Similar to last year, I plan to eventually write a post of my review and the order in which I judged the CMS to be the best among the five finalists for this category. For now though, I don't want to take the spotlight away from either MODx or SilverStripe as the well deserved runner up winners.

MODx Web Development is a new book from Packt which will help users create a powerful, dynamic website by using the individual elements of MODx. Written by Antano Solar John this book is an example-driven tutorial, which will take readers from the installation of MODx through to configuration, customization, and deployment. It will enable them to build a fully-functional, feature-rich website quickly and without any programming language.

Even though I've wanted to focus more on MODx in this blog, I have to say I haven't done a very good job bringing this CMS and content management framework up for discussion. With the release of MODx Evolution 1.0 and the upcoming release of MODx Revolution 2.0 I have no doubt we'll be seeing more headlines for MODx.

Last week, MODx Evolution 1.0.1 was released. This release contains enough security improvements and bug fixes that the MODx developers consider the update a "mandatory upgrade" for any site running previous releases of MODx Evolution/0.9.X.

After five years of development, the MODx CMS has finally went to version 1.0. Late last week, the project leaders for MODx made the following announcement:

To say we're excited about this release would be a bit of an understatement. Far, far more than just a new Manager theme and some bugfixes here and there, Evolution 1.0.0 represents a ton of work by a lot of people. Our classic code base is no where close to outdated or obsolete, on the contrary it just took a huge leap forward and sets the stage for continuing development and improvements to our classic code base.

Boatloads of bugfixes and feature requests aside, our 1.0 release focuses on a few key areas. The international communities deserve a huge "thank you" for all their hard work in getting their languages updated, too

MODx Evolution is actually one of two branches of development for the CMS. The release based on legacy code-MODx Evolution-has existed since 2004. There is also a completely rewritten MODx Revolution release that will occur in late 2009. In fact the release candidate for MODx Revolution is due later this summer.

Some of the new features and changes in MODX 1.0 Evolution include:

• Many updates to Manager and Installer language translations
• Now handles RSS, Word, Excel, XML, HTML, CSS, JS, PDF and plain documents with custom icons in the Site Tree
• Remove legacy code no longer needed