Drupal won both the Best PHP Open Source CMS category and the Overall 2008 Open Source CMS Award from the Packt Open Source Content Management System Award!

Check the news here : www.packtpub.com/award

This is great news because my blog and lots of my websites are made with Drupal and I'm everyday happier not to have chosen Joomla when I was still evaluating both and hesitating.

The Packt Open Source Content Management System Award 2007 is designed to encourage, support, recognize and reward an Open Source Content Management System (CMS) that has been selected by a panel of judges and visitors to the Packt website which has been promoted by the different open source projects communities. This is very nice of Packt to reward open source projects and in my opinion Drupal is the best of all, it has been the most useful piece of software for me so far in my money making journey on the web, soif it depended only on me it should be the overall winner of this friendly competition as well as the winner in the two categories in which it is a finalist.

Packt is pleased to reveal that WordPress is the first winner of the 2007 Open Source CMS Award, picking up the best Open Source Social Networking Content Management System. In a very close category, WordPress came out in front of Elgg and Drupal, who finished joint second.

In what is one of the new categories for 2007, the Open Source Social Networking CMS Award was designed to recognise Content Management Systems that promoted the collaboration and distribution of information and development of communities. The Judges commented on WordPress's ease of configuration, professional approach, usability and enthusiastic community. Along with the title, WordPress will receive $2,000 in prize money from Packt.

With the judges choosing and internauts contributing their top three choices, Elgg and Drupal ended up on the same number of votes in joint second. Judges praised Elgg as a true Open Source Social Networking CMS, its variety of themes and overall user experience. Drupal had a long list of positive comments from the judges and was praised as a good overall package.

The total prize fund is $20 000 but for this category of BEST SOCIAL NETWORKING OPEN SOURCE CMS only the winner of the five finalists gets $2000 and the other projects get nothing. Here are the results...

1. WordPress www.WordPress.org
2. Drupal www.Drupal.org, Elgg www.Elgg.org

LifeType www.LifeType.net and Moodle www.Moodle.org didn't make it to the top 3 but are worth checking out too since they were finalist projects...

Congratulations to WordPress, the winning project of BEST SOCIAL NETWORKING CMS 2007!!!

Integrating GetResponse autoresponder with Joomla CMS will definitively be trickier than integrating AWeber because it seems there's way less material covering GetResponse integration in general, including on their own site and support forums. There is no API or database integration. There are settings where you can email to a specific email (e.g. subscribeme@yoursite.com) and get added though which could probably be leveraged to achieve this.

Ideally, when a new member subscribe to your Joomla site, he would then be subscribed to one of your lists (or at least a confirmation email from GetResponse should be sent to his email address) and then later on he would have the choice of subscribing to more lists directly from your Joomla site.

Well, it's definitively not that simple, here's what I've found: