BIRMINGHAM, England, November 5 /PRNewswire/ -- After three intense months of voting, Packt Publishing can today announce that Drupal has won the Overall 2007 Open Source CMS Award. With 18,000 votes on Packt's website, coupled with the expert opinions from a panel of judges, Drupal succeeds Joomla! as the overall winner and receives a cheque for US$5,000.

Joomla! and Drupal occupied first and second places in 2006, with their quality proving to be popular with the judges again this year. Joomla! retains its position in the top three, coming second and winning US$3,000, with CMS Made Simple in third place collecting US$2,000.

Initially released in 2001, Drupal has grown to become one of the most downloaded Open Source Content Management Systems with one of the most enthusiastic and committed communities.

"This is a great honor for the Drupal community and the thousands of individual developers who've contributed to the project" confirms Drupal developer and core contributor Jeff Eaton. "We've worked hard to make Drupal as flexible, as scalable, and as accessible as possible. It's a great week for all of Open Source; the winners in every category have shown that OSS can produce powerful solutions for a wide range of needs" he concludes.

Alongside the overall winner, Packt ran categories for best Open Source PHP Content Management System, best non-PHP CMS, best Open Source Social Networking and also most promising Open Source CMS. In a twist on the overall results, Joomla! beat Drupal into second place for the best Open Source PHP CMS. Packt handed out a total of US$20,000 in prize money to the winning Content Management Systems.

Winners in the other final categories include:

- Most Promising: MODx

- Best Open Source PHP: Joomla!

- Best non PHP Open Source CMS: mojoPortal

- Best Social Networking: WordPress

The Awards were designed to recognize and reward Open Source CMS's for their consistently high standards in what is an extremely competitive field. The result of this year's Award confirms this quality and also suggests that there isn't necessarily one CMS that is the best, more that there is the best one to fit an individual user's needs and requirements.

Full results of the 2007 Open Source CMS Award can be found at http://www.PacktPub.com/Award

About Packt

Packt is a modern, unique publishing company with a focus on producing cutting-edge books for communities of developers, administrators, and newbies alike.

Packt's books and publications share the experiences of fellow IT professionals in adapting and customizing today's systems, applications, and frameworks. Their solutions-based books give readers the knowledge and power to customize the software and technologies they're using to get the job done.

For more information, please visit http://www.PacktPub.com Damian Carvill +44(0)121-683-1170 contact@packtpub.com

Damian Carvill, +44(0)121-683-1170, contact@packtpub.com