I'm very gratified to announce that mojoPortal has won 3rd place in the 2009 CMS Awards by Packt Publishing, in the Non-PHP category. It is particularly exciting that mojoPortal was the only .NET based CMS to place this year, nudging out DotNetNuke in the Best Other category.

Plone, a Python based CMS retained their crown from last year, and dotCMS, a java based CMS took second place.

In 2007, the first year of the contest, mojoPortal actually won this category over the more established Plone, but we were the only .NET CMS among the contenders that year. In 2008 there were several other .NET projects in the mix and though we were a finalist in the Best Other category, DotNetNuke took 3rd place both in the Best Other and Best Overall Category. This year, after the nomination phase, DotNetNuke was a finalist again in both the Best Overall and Best Other categories and mojoPortal only made the finalists in the Best Other Category, so it seemed like they had already placed ahead of us again this year, but in the end we prevailed against the odds. 

It is a very competitive field and all the contending projects certainly deserve respect. While some have criticized the contest as being merely a popularity contest, I can't really say it seems that way to me. While mojoPortal's popularity is growing rapidly, we are still much less known than many of the projects in the competition. Certainly we were an underdog and no-where near as popular as Plone in 2007 when we won first place in the non-PHP category, and DotNetNuke clearly has a much larger user base, better brand recognition, and more marketing muscle backed by venture capital. So obviously there is more than vote counting going on. It would be nice if the judges post their individual analysis, at least one has already posted some notes about his impressions of the contenders and I know some of the other judges are planning to do the same.

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