Joomla! Has been announced as the winner of the 2006 Open Source CMS Award with Drupal in second place and Plone finishing in third.

(quoted from http://www.packtpub.com/award)

The judges had strong compliments for all five finalists, with some of the highlights listed below:

Joomla! (Winner)

• Very easy to install and use with lots of extensions and modules
• The documentation is exhaustive and concise
• Admin user interface is intuitive and powerful
• The backend of Joomla! is very usable and the WYSIWYG editor the content was nice
• Seems like it would scale well and provides a lot of customization options
• Large and active community

Drupal (First runner-up)

• Has been around for quite some time and is stable and actively developed
• Well coded and has an available granular permissions system and a strong eye for security
• Configuration was a breeze
• Lightweight installation
• Plethora of modules and themes
• Exceptional documentation and has an active and friendly community
• The node concept is very good

Plone (Second runner-up)

• Very flexible and powerful
• Great user interface
• Very clean default installation
• Lots of addon modules
• Worth taking the steep learning curve
• Impressed with the customization it offers
• Integration with LDAP or other login systems is a plus

 Other contestants in earlier rounds:

(in alphabetical order)