Each year, Packt Publishing conducts a competition to determine the top open source content management system. Nominations are accepted from the general public for several weeks, then tabulated to determine the top 5 in each of several categories - Best Overall, Most Promising, Best PHP and Best Other. New this year was a Hall of Fame award for previous winners in the Best Overall category.

1st place  winners in the 2009 competition were WordPress, Drupal, ImpressCMS and Plone.

In rapid succession, XOOPS has released 2.4.0, 2.4.1 and 2.4.2. Versions 2.4.1 and 2.4.2 are bug-fix releases of 2.4.0

 XOOPS 2.4.x series is the LAST version of XOOPS tested on and supporting PHP4. The next releases will be tested and certified exclusively on PHP5. It is also the last version series to support MySQL versions below 5.0.

An updated version of PHP 5.3 has been released - the PHP development team recently released 5.3.1 with over 100 bug fixes and improvements to the 5.3 line. Some of the fixes are security related.

Users and webmasters probably won't be seeing this in a normal hosting environment for a little while yet, but developers are using this in their development environments to test their applications for compatibility and to start taking advantage of the new features introduced in PHP 5.3

If you are interested in how you can make the move to PHP 5.3, you can read the 5.2 to 5.3 migration guide. If you really want all the details about what's changed, read the changelog.

After 3 1/2 years, Matt Farina and Rob Feature of the Geeks & God Podcast are moving on to other endeavors.The aim of their podcast was to "educate and encourage Christian ministries to use technology and the Internet effectively." They also had a strong affinity towards Drupal, the system they used in their professional lives and many episodes focused on Drupal topics. While they didn't say exactly what they would be doing, they have provided an email signup to get a notification when the new project is ready to be unveiled.

The ImpressCMS development team has released ImpressCMS 1.1.3, a security update for their 1.1 version. The vulnerabilities were not in their core code, but in 2 of the 3rd party libraries used and distributed with their core - Smarty and PHPOpenID. If your site is running on a version prior to 1.1.3, it is strongly recommended you upgrade to the latest version.

Smarty is a template engine, driving the way pages are built and displayed by ImpressCMS. PHPOpenID allows you to use OpenID authentication for logins on an ImpressCMS site.