If you have been over to Pro Blogger you will have seen that Darren Rowse had a poll asking his readers what blogging platform they use. Wordpress easily topped the list and it’s really amazing to see how popular Wordpress has become. Wordpress also has great community involvement, never ending plugins and is popular among some big name bloggers who will often recommend it to newbies and I’d agree with them for a blogging platform.

So the reason I’m blogging about this is because most open source systems are pretty awesome regardless of which one you choose. I recently found the 2007 Open Source CMS Awards website and had a look at their results. The overall winner was Drupal which only had a small number of results on the Pro Blogger Poll.

2007 Overall Open Source Content Management System Award:
1. Drupal
2. Joomla!
3. CMS Made Simple

Most Promising Open Source Content Management System:
1. MODx
2. TYPOlight, dotCMS

Best PHP Open Source Content Management System:
1. Joomla!
2. Drupal
3. e107

Best Other Open Source Content Management System:
1. mojoPortal
2. Plone
3. Silva

Best Open Source Social Networking Content Management System:
1. WordPress
2. Drupal, Elgg

I always like to have a look at how other CMS platforms work so if I need to put a site together I can choose the best platform for my needs. So far I’ve used Wordpress and Textpattern but lately I’ve given Drupal a try. I haven’t done that much with Drupal yet other than a standard install and getting familiar with the interface but my initial thoughts are that it looks quite promising.

I have used Textpattern for a site I am currently working on for a client and I have found that Textpattern is really clean and I like the way you can easily write xhtml code directly in your blog posts or mix it up with Textile. You can also get plugins for Textpattern but there aren’t as many as you will find for Wordpress. With Textpattern you’ll also miss out on those need Wordpress widgets which are really neat. I’m currently working on a site using Drupal so I’ll post once I have had enough exposure to make post my thoughts.