The 4th Annual Open Source CMS Awards sponsored by Packt Publishing is open for nominations Joomla is eligible for Best PHP Open Source CMS and you can also nominate project contributors such as Open Source MVPs. The nominations are open until September 11. Voting among the top five nominees will begin on September 18.

Joomla, along with Drupal, is already a nominee in the new Hall of Fame category. This category will have sub-category awards for Best Extensions and Themes. These will be nominated by the CMS's representatives. Watch the community blogs for more information.

A recent blog post (and yes, that's a nofollow link...) has made quite an impression on a lot of Joomla users. The blog post is written to give an overview of different Content Management Systems (CMS) and their pros and cons.

However, the author falls into the trap of attacking certain platforms - and Joomla in particular. The way it was done is quite nasty. In my opinion there's no place this kind of subjective, biased ranting in a post comparing different systems. Although I don't think it's hurting the community or adaptation of Joomla, it is important to set the record straight. Many of the commenters in the original post express strong feelings about the author's opinions.

I believe the 'Joomla is Evil' way of saying it was written to provoke and get traffic to the post. However, the author mentions a few negative things about Joomla and I thought I'd dissect them ;)

I've written a guest post on CMS Wire which was published earlier today.

In the post, I present a Google Summer of Code project that I believe many Joomla users will find useful: Native Multi-Site support.

The Joomla Project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Joomla 1.5.12 [Wojmamni Ama Woi]. This release contains a number of bug fixes and three moderate-level security fixes. It has been less than a month since Joomla 1.5.11 was released on June 3, 2008.

The Joomla Project needs your help in testing our next release: Joomla 1.5.12 RC. This Joomla release has 22 bug fixes and two updates that are significant enough to justify community testing.

The release candidate includes an upgrade to TinyMCE and changes to the framework PHPMailer class.

As all Joomla users know, this CMS is open source, which in our case means it's made by volunteers across the globe. These people have a burning interest in making Joomla the best CMS out there.

How about you? Are you ready to contribute? It might seem hard to contribute to an open source project, but there are many tasks available other than programming the core of the system. In this article, I suggest some ways you may contribute to the Joomla! CMS project.

This is kinda old news for many of you, but if you haven't already seen it, head on over to www.linux.com.

The recently relaunched site use Joomla - and it's a clean and nicely done site.

There's a huge selection of addons for Firefox available.

I've found my favorites for Joomla work and recommend them to everyone.

They will save you a great deal of time, especially when trying to figure out a template is built, bug tracking and fixing and in your day-to-day work as a web developer.

The Joomla Project announces the immediate availability of Joomla 1.5.11 [Vea]. This is a security release and users are strongly encouraged to upgrade immediately.

This release contains 26 bug fixes, two moderate-level security fixes and one low-level security fix. It has been 11 weeks since Joomla 1.5.10 was released on March 28, 2009. The Development Working Group's goal is to continue to provide regular, frequent updates to the Joomla community.

Joomla was recently featured in a comparison test between three different CMS platforms: Joomla, Drupal and WordPress.

Joomla did great in this CMS showdown! I'm not surprised.