Joomla has won the Packt Publishing award for the top open source CMS.

Now in its sixth year, many consider the Packt Open Source Award as a top honor for an open source project. Joomla won the award based on a combination of public voting and input by a panel of judges consisting of open source luminaries.

Julian Copes of Packt Publishing said:

“Although around since 2005, Joomla really reinvented itself this year with the introduction of Joomla 1.6 and 1.7, the first product releases for the CMS since 2008. Furthermore, Joomla realized dramatic growth this year as evidenced by its number of downloads and documented government sites powered by Joomla. We are proud to honor Joomla with its third Packt Open Source Award since we launched it six years ago.”

Joomla previously won the same award, the Packt Open Source CMS Award, in 2006 and also won the Packt Best PHP Open Source CMS Award 2007. Some of the milestones the open source CMS reached this year that contributed to it winning the Packt award include:

• Joomla surpassed 26 million downloads. Although it launched in 2005, this number is only from 2007 to the present since that is when Joomla began documenting downloads.
• It documented more than 2,900 government sites worldwide powered by Joomla. These include the U.S. Central Command, U.K. Ministry of Defense and many more.
• Info-Tech Research recently confirmed Joomla powers more than 1.5 million websites. These include Citibank, eBay, General Electric and many more.

Ryan Ozimek, president of Open Source Matters, the not-for-profit created to provide organizational, legal and financial support to the Joomla project, said:

“Joomla’s documented growth over the past year is a bi-product of our broad, diverse community spanning hundreds of thousands of people around the world. The people and open source experts have spoken with this award and we are honored that they have acknowledged what all of these people in our community passionately believe — Joomla is the absolutely best platform to power websites, Intranets and blogs.”

I was cleaning my computer files today and found one of the websites we did in 2004... WOW... it was like TIME TRAVELING :) 
It's amazing how website technology has evolved in the past 7 years.

Then (2004)

View snapshot bellow of an OLD static HTML with frames.

This site was consider awesome at that time :) but looking at it today, every picture on the photo gallery was a separated HTML file (A SEPARATED PAGE) instead of being part of an actual PHOTO GALLERY... I also remember having to setup every link for the BEFORE and AFTER arrows in the gallery...  each a separated link done one by one... CRAZY!
Another old technology I remember as part of this site was the use of FRAMES, then a very nice tool to separate different parts of a website and create nice menus with pages inside, NOW a horrible memory from the past that hides EVERYTHING from google :)

Now (2011)

View a snapshot of one of our latest Joomla CMS Websites bellow (www.elizabethvanriper.com)

With the growth of CMS (Content management solutions), now everything is easier and faster. That photo gallery is a component that you just upload pictures to, and it shows them in different formats depending on the settings you provide thru a very simple online tool :)
New tools like blogs, RSS feeds and contact forms make websites more interactive and engaging. On the other hand, all the power is in your hands, and not on the designer's or programmer's hands. 

You own your website, you can change your website and make it grow yourself... 

Learn more about CMS technology and Joomla (our choice for CMS) at www.joomla.org

Thanks www.joomlablogger.net for the information.