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.

Packt is pleased to reveal that WordPress is the first winner of the 2007 Open Source CMS Award, picking up the best Open Source Social Networking Content Management System. In a very close category, WordPress came out in front of Elgg and Drupal, who finished joint second.

Packt [packed], a publishing company that produces cutting-edge books for communities, developers, administrators and newbies started the Packt Open Source Content Management System Awards in 2006 as a way to encourage, support and recognize Open Source Content Management Systems. This year, aside from increasing the prize money they’ve also added several new categories including the award that WordPress won.

In what is one of the new categories for 2007, the Open Source Social Networking CMS Award was designed to recognise Content Management Systems that promoted the collaboration and distribution of information and development of communities. The Judges commented on WordPress’s ease of configuration, professional approach, usability and enthusiastic community.

Congratulations to Matt Mullenweg and the rest of the guys at Automattic! Of course this won’t be possible without the programmers, plugin authors, theme designers for their respective contributions to the development of WordPress and the rest of the community who have been supporting WordPress through the years.

Complete information on the 2007 Open Source CMS Awards