Asymptomatic

Apart from the contest that the Viddler folks have going on where you can win an iPhone by posting a MealToday video, there's another contest where you can win an iPod simply by filling out a simple form.

Packt Publishing - a publisher of fine technical books, several of which I own - is sponsoring a contest between Content Management Systems, where simply nominating a CMS enters you to win an iPod!

As you may know, I am one of many developers who write code for Habari, a project that is almost a year old and about which we're all very passionate. I would suggest that you nominate Habari for their prize as the "Most Promising Open Source Content Management System".

It is a category only open to CMSes that have been first released in the last two years, leaving out the more obvious contenders. If Habari wins the prize, we'll be most happy about the prestige, but the cash prize could really offset server costs, fund 3rd-party security auditing, or otherwise benefit the community.

Of course, it's a bit skeezy for me to just say "you can win an iPod" to get you to endorse Habari. Perhaps I should give you a few reasons why I think Habari is the most promising open source content management system, and is deserving of the reward?

The number one thing that Habari has going for it is the people. The group of folks who are working on Habari are easily the best group of folks I've collaborated with. We've got experts on our team, people who know design, code, and the architecture on which our software runs. The people who help outside of code production are fantastic too. Our documentation team is forming up quite nicely, and thanks to them, with our latest release we've distributed the beginnings of the manual that we've been demanding from day one. The support in the community is alive and encouraging, and there's nothing but excitement about what Habari brings to content management.

Habari is promising because it is future-thinking. We've made a commitment to using the cutting edge of technology. No more PHP4, it's just PHP5 for us. This mean that as the technology trickles down to the common man, we'll have been well-established there while others are just trying to gain the advantage of that new technology.

Open source is a big part of what we do with Habari. One of the neat things about Habari is the Apache Software License that we use. I find that it's less restrictive than the GPL for a developer, really giving you power over how you want to use the software. Because we employ the ASL, we've had to write many of our components from scratch because the preexisting ones that people are familiar with are only licensed for GPL. As a result, other ASL or BSD-licensed software benefits from these libraries being available for use. We're not just expanding our source, but we're helping the open source community to build stronger applications.

The Habari project has a lot of great ideas for how to move forward with blogging. As our platform matures, you're going to see some great new features evolve from our code that hopefully other blogging platforms will employ. You can already see how some of our ideas and ideals have affected other blogging software.

I've provided what I think are a few good reasons for you to nominate Habari as the most promising open source content management system. Even if you don't use Habari, you can still see that Habari is a promising platform worthy of the award. If my reasons themselves aren't enough, then I suggest you try out Habari or learn more about our community by visiting the site. Barring that, just vote for us so that you can win an iPod.

Hey, it's not beneath me to suggest it for something that I think is deserving.