With the release of version 1.1 of its content management system in late October, ImpressCMS has capped off an exciting year that would be the envy of almost any open source project.The ImpressCMS 1.0 release earlier this year garnered a good amount of interest, and ImpressCMS 1.1 introduces a solid new set of functionality intended to make content creation easier, improve security, and broaden support for multiple languages. Adding to the buzz, Impress CMS has been recognized in a number of open source software competitions, both as a finalist in the 2008 SourceForge Best New Project category and as the third-place winner of Packt Publishing's Most Promising Open Source CMS award.

ImpressCMS has an interesting pedigree. While it's been around for less than a year, don't mistake it for a lightweight -- it originally came about as a fork of the well-established XOOPS content management system. After developers had differing opinions on the direction of the project, the split was formalized in an open letter to the XOOPS community in January 2008. The good news is that many open source projects have survived and even thrived after this sort of split -- in fact, Joomla was born out of a similar disagreement within the core Mambo content management system team, and both systems continue to have dedicated communities and active development cycles.

As for ImpressCMS, it has a good foundation of basic features and a promising road map. The project team seems to have a strong focus on critical items such as ease of setup, administration, and content creation, and the user community, while still fairly small, seems active and helpful. These are all good signs, and make ImpressCMS 1.1 well worth checking out.