I was first introduced to WordPress about 5-6 years and it was love at first sight. From the time I started using it, I’ve never looked back or thought about shifting to another blogging platform/software. WordPress has gone a long way since then and I’ve witness it grow and mature from a blogging software into a full-featured CMS.

Being an avid WordPress user and advocate, I was happy when I found out that WordPress was recently awarded the 2009 Overall Best Open Source CMS Award by the Open Source CMS Awards. Matt Mullenweg himself was very excited about the award.

I was very excited last week to learn that WordPress has been awarded the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. This is a landmark for us, as it is the first time we’ve won this award, and it marks a shift in the public perception of WordPress, from blog software to full-featured CMS. No small contest, the Open Source CMS Awards received over 12,000 nominations and more than 23,000 votes across five categories.

Aside from winning the Overall Best Open Source CMS category, WordPress was also 1st runner-up for the Best Open Source PHP CMS category. Making it to the #2 spot this year is a great feat considering that WordPress wasn’t even in the top 5 last year and puts WordPress ahead of Joomla. Another thing to note is that Drupal, the winner of the Best Open Source PHP CMS category, outranked WordPress only by a very slight margin, which means that WordPress has really become more popular with the users and developers over the past year.

I like Matt’s ending statement:

Every member of the WordPress community, from core developer to beginning user, should be proud to be part of this momentum: congratulations to us all!

As a user, advocate and a member of the WordPress community I’m happy and proud for this recent achievement of WordPress and I certainly feel that I’m a part of this success. Even though I’m not a core developer or theme/plugin developer, I believe that I’ve done my part with my WordPress news/updates, WordPress theme & plugin reviews and other WordPress-related posts which are my contributions to the community.

Congratulations to WordPress, the Automattic team and all the WordPress core developers, theme/plugin developers and users!

Btw, I just remembered that WordPress won Best Open Source Social Networking CMS in the 2007 Open Source CMS Awards two years ago.