php
Packt publishing just announced earlier this morning that Drupal has won the 2009 Open Source PHP CMS award!
Packt Publishing is pleased to announce that Drupal has won the Best Open Source PHP CMS Category in the 2009 Open Source CMS Award. This category featured a very close contest between the top three, Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla! in which Drupal ended up as the overall choice for the judges and the public.
Joomla was the second place winner (kudos to them as well!); read the original release here.
With Drupal being used on Whitehouse.gov, AT&T's mobile apps website, and countless other corporate sites and subsites, it's a good time to be in the Open Source arena!
More award categories will be announced soon!
- Most Promising Open Source CMS: winner to be announced on November 11, 2009
- Hall of Fame: winner to be announced on November 12, 2009
- Best Overall Open Source CMS: winner to be announced on November 13, 2009
I posted a story over on Open Source Catholic today concerning page caching and its importance for saving a server under a heavy load (read: the slashdot effect). You can save a lot of resources on your server by not only using built-in page caching on your favorite CMS, but also exploring further options (for Drupal, there's Boost (read our case study on Boost); for WordPress, there's WP Super Cache). From OSC:
A couple months ago, the Archdiocese of Saint Louis announced that a new Archbishop had been chosen (then-Archbishop-elect Robert J. Carlson). For the announcement, the Archdiocese streamed the press conference online, then posted pictures on the St. Louis Review website of the day's events (updated every hour or two).
During this period of time, the Archdiocesan website had over 2,000 visitors per hour, and almost all the visitors were hitting the home page. The website (run on Joomla 1.0.x) didn't have many caching mechanisms in place, and for almost a complete hour, the website was returning server errors as the processor was pegged at 100% utilization. Something had to be done!
I just finished rolling a patch for fixing node.tpl.php in Drupal 7 over on the Drupal.org issue queue; hopefully it's ready to be rolled into core, as it's been weeks months since that particular issue was started. Page.tpl.php is already complete. We still have a few more to go, including comment.tpl.php, block.tpl.php and a bunch of little .tpl.php files.
I think Drupal 7 is going to be the best release of Drupal yet, in terms of being able to have a lot of appeal to non-programmers/techies. I set up my first ever full-fledged Wordpress site a few days ago, and it was super-easy to get things going (although also severely limited in what it could do, compared to a base Drupal install with Views and CCK), choose a new theme, change some settings, and hit the ground running.
By making it easier for themers and designers to quickly customize a Drupal site to their liking, and by having some themes included with core that are either (a) beautiful and functional or (b) great for starter themes (like zen, stark, or genesis... all which are great for different reasons), we can grow the Drupal design community exponentially.
We're almost to that point; we just need to keep making patches, keep having meaningful discussions in #drupal (unlike this one) and the issue queues, and keep feeding webchick cookies (and ice cream). Let's make Drupal the best CMS for designers, themers, and everyone in-between!
