The voting for the 2008 Open Source CMS Award opens today, with Drupal certainly looking to repeat its victory for the content management system of the year from last year. The awards, now in their third year, are sponsored by Packt Publishing, and are designed to "encourage, support, recognize, and reward" popularity and quality in the many open source content management systems available.Last year's award contest was hard fought, with the winner, Drupal, edging out Joomla in a tight race. Joomla, however, beat Drupal in the Best Open Source PHP category. The other winners were MODx for Most Promising CMS, MojoPortal for Best Non-PHP Open Source CMS, and WordPress for Best Social Networking CMS.

This year's contest is sure to just as competitive, as some newer competitors have really hit their stride, and many veterans have broken new ground. In addition to carrying over the same categories from last year, a new category has been added -- the 2008 Open Source CMS MVP Award, which is intended to recognize the often overlooked individual contributions to projects.

Packt Publishing has long been a source of excellent books and articles on open source content management among other topics, so its involvement lends credence to the awards. The prizes are nothing to sneeze at, either -- the overall winner's project team takes home $5,000, with another $15,000 being divided among the winners and runners-up other categories.

The time line for the contest is as follows: the nomination voting begins July 14 and closes Aug. 25. On Sept. 1, the list of finalists across all categories will be announced, and the final round of voting will be open until Oct. 20. Starting on Oct. 27, the winners will be announced, starting with Open Source Content Management System MVPs on Oct. 27, the Best Other (meaning non-PHP based) Open Source CMS on Oct. 28, the Best PHP Open Source CMS on Oct. 29, the most Promising Open Source CMS on Oct. 30, and the Overall Winner announced on Oct. 31.

Voting is open to everyone, so visit www.packtpub.com/award to learn more about the contest and take the opportunity to cast a vote for your favorite.