In recent years, content management systems (CMS) have become very powerful tools for building, deploying and managing web sites, blogs and more. And, along with that trend, open course CMS platforms have absolutely flourished. You're probably familiar with some of the big names in this arena, including Drupal (which Ostatic is based on) and Joomla. As we noted in this post, selecting a CMS to build around can be a complicated process, since the publishing tools provided are hardly the only issue. What many people don't realize, though, is that you can try out the major CMS platforms at OpenSource CMS, a great site for gaining experience for free.

How successful is the open source content management system (CMS) Drupal? Well, in a recent interview, Drupal founder Dries Buytaert noted that nearly 790,000 people in 228 countries contribute to the platform, and it powers more than a million online sites. The White House, NASA and Twitter use it, and OStatic is also built on Drupal. In an interview we did with Buytaert, he described the core contributors to the project as on the "same scale as the Linux kernel."

Getting started with Drupal can be daunting at first, but there are a lot of free resources for it. Here are several good ways to get going with this powerful CMS.

It's that time of year when the open source community looks back on what the best projects and products of the past 12 months were. A peek at some of the compilations on this topic shows that there is some agreement on which projects and products stood out, but there are also some outlier technologies from this year that you may not be so familiar with. Here is a handy guide to some of the best open source awards collections of 2011.