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In July 2006, the Open Source Content Management (CMS) Award was launched. The Award scheme is designed to encourage, support, recognize and reward Open Source Content Management Systems that have been selected by a panel of judges and visitors to the website.

In November 2006, Joomla! was announced as the first winner of the Award receiving $5,000. Drupal finished second receiving $3,000 with Plone finishing third and receiving $2,000.

Packt ran the Open Source CMS Award again in 2007, this time expanding the categories and prize money to a total of $20,000. The overall Award was won this time by Drupal who received a prize of $5,000, with the 2006 winner Joomla! finishing second and collecting $3,000. CMS Made Simple, a newcomer to the finals, finished in third and received $2,000. Despite finishing second to Drupal in the overall Award, Joomla! finished first in the Best Open Source PHP Category, which had a different panel of judges evaluating the finalists.

The 2008 Open Source CMS Award was won, once again, by Drupal, finishing ahead of Joomla! and DotNetNuke.

Drupal (pronounced /ˈdruːpəl/) is a free and open source content management system (CMS) written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. It is used as a back-end system for at least 1% of all websites worldwide, ranging from small personal blogs to large corporate and political sites, including whitehouse.gov and data.gov.uk. It is also used for knowledge management and business collaboration.

The standard release of Drupal, known as Drupal core, contains basic features common to most CMSs. These include the ability to register and maintain individual user accounts within a role-based permission / privilege system, create and manage menus, RSS-feeds, customize page layout, perform logging, and administer the system. As installed, Drupal provides options to create a classic brochureware website, a single- or multi-user blog, an Internet forum, or a community website providing for user-generated content.

You can find a large list of high quality drupal themes at http://www.totaltheme.com. Use these themes as inspiration for your own site design, or you can use a theme as-is. Most themes are shown with a preview image so that you can get an idea of what your site will look like using the theme.

After you have found a theme that you want to try, you can install it on your site by carrying out the following steps: