It's always good to be on the winning side. The reward after the weeks, months or years of hard work. It takes dedication and focus to win, if it’s a team game then it's also about cohesion and communication, support and solidarity.

It can also be about things coming together to produce the right time for a particular group to make their dream come true.

Look at what happened in this year's Eurovision song contest. Finally, the UK got its act together and produced a winning entry. Their dream of winning was thwarted in the public voting stage by Ukraine because of the current politics. If it had been a normal year then the public would not have voted as they did, but for totally understandable reasons they won the people's hearts and the people's vote and made history with their third win of the competition.

A decision the UK is more than happy with. 

In some spheres of life, luck can also make up a big part of the equation. 

Professional poker players have not won the poker millionaires for some years now because of the large number of people entering the games. It's easy to get a bad hand at an early stage of the game and this can knock even the finest poker player out. In games of luck and chance, you do need luck to at least provide a level playing field to stand a chance of your skill and dedication to shine through.

Winning over the years

But winning consistently is a hard act to keep up.

Injury and fatigue can derail the most talented sportsmen and women. Age and health affect individuals and teams alike.

For individuals, the onset of age is an inevitable barrier to continued success and triumph.

When a team is involved there has to be a rotation of talent and a succession plan. Backup for individuals of the team when ill, or needing family time to avoid burnout.

The most successful teams test their junior members and assess when ready; they also rotate the older members of the team into advisory roles and allow them to mentor and train the next generation.

And what has all this to do with Joomla you may ask?

Joomla is a serial winner. We have been winning awards since 2005 but this year we have already taken more than any other year.

That's worth celebrating.

Awards so far this year

Comparing awards from one year to the awards of another year is not as easy as it should be.. The CMS Critics Choice was awarded in late march 2022 but is listed as 2021! 

So taking all the awards given this year we have seven so far

• CMS Critic People's Choice Awards - Best Open Source CMS
• CMS Critic People's Choice Awards - Best Free CMS
• CMS Critic Critics Award - Best Open Source CMS
• Expert Insights - Spring 2022 Best-Of Awards
• FOSS Awards - Highly Recommended
• Cloudfest Hackathon - Overall Hackathon Winner
• Cloudfest Hackathon - Social Media Engagement

Some of the comments from the different awards are worth listing.

Best Free CMS: Surprised that Joomla carried this category? Don't be. They've cultivated an enthusiastic fan base with a rising fervor for their favorite platform. Joomla continues to have a strong community of open source users, making it one of the top three most popular content management systems in the world - and winner of our "Best Free CMS" category.

Best Open Source CMS: Despite the far-casting shadow of WordPress, Joomla won big with its community – in no small part to its continued investment in innovation. In fact, 2021 saw a host of new features added to the "Best Open Source CMS" platform, including the Joomla! 4.0 release with notable improvements. We would like to congratulate the Joomla development team on their win in two categories.

Best Open Source CMS: With over 40% of all websites running on WordPress, it might be a logical choice for the best open source platform. But heightened security risks, persistent plug-in issues, and the continuing saga with Gutenberg give us a moment to pause and reflect. As Joomla approaches a million active members in its forum – many fiercely loyal to the project – there are a lot of reasons to take a good look at this platform again with fresh eyes. 

Joomla's community is also one of the most passionate we've seen when it comes to supporting their platform. In fact, they swiftly delivered wins for Joomla in our People's Choice Awards in two categories: "Best Free CMS" and "Best Open Source CMS." That's what we call a rabid fan base.

Expert Insights: The platform is praised by users for its ease of use, customizability, and wealth of out-of-the-box features, though some users note that templates could be more engaging. We recommend Joomla! for SMBs and enterprises across all industries—including governments, non-profits, publications, e-commerce, and corporate websites—that are looking for an easy-to-use, coupled CMS to manage more basic websites.

Cloudfest Hackathon - Overall Hackathon Winner: The jury was not only impressed by the results, the presentation, the social media engagement, and the huge motivation of the team; but also how they developed solutions that could be implemented across CMS—which makes the results even more impactful for the open web.

Cloudfest Hackathon - Social Media Engagement: This team totally rocked social media during the weekend., heavily supported by the Joomla! community from home. They even created a template for hackathon posts, which others can use in the future.

These are snippets from some of the awards which help us to understand how others see Joomla from the outside, the perspective they have and how they perceive the project.

What does winning awards do for Joomla

Although it is lovely to have the recognition and appreciation, winning awards is a great form of publicity. If you are about to start building a website, starting with an award winning platform certainly gives you the feeling that you are in good hands and following the market.

Winning awards brings a cohesion to the membership: we are all in this together, we all had a part to play in the awards. It's not my award, it's not your award, it's our award and together we achieved it. 

How can we win more awards?

Simply, by keeping up the great work, all of us get involved in voting and promoting the Joomla when awards come and by feeding back news of new awards to those that can organise the community.

If you hear of an award that we should be taking part in then let me know, send me an email or message me in Glip, I will be very happy to take it up with the teams that can help spread the word.

And the last word is taken from one of the above awards and made me laugh but also feel a pride in what we can achieve. It was the comment from the Critics Choice: Best Open Source CMS and they ended with “That's what we call a rabid fan base.” 

So here's to you rabid fan base: well done and great job!