Concrete5 CMS - any opinions?

[Damian E]

Hiya everyone,

I've been searching for a Content Management System for a client and have tested Drupal and Joomla which both offer excellent add-ons and themes but are quite complicated if you have no or limited technical knowledge.

I've just discovered a product called concrete5 and after a quick online test have been really impressed with it's user friendliness and ease of setup. Has anyone any experience with this software, especially with regards to creating new templates or altering existing ones?

Any advice / opinions would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,

Damian

[Zeal]

Hey Damien,

They are LOADS and LOADS of different CMS's available.

what it comes down to is:

• What do you want to achieve by using a CMS
• What functions do you want
• The scale of the website

All CMS have pro's and cons - Depending on your own website needs, if you could post a bit more information on what the site is about.... we may be able to advise better?


Lee

[FreelanceSoftwareDeveloper]

I've looked at a few recently and am thinking of using modx.

Just taken a quick look at this, i'm going to give it a try on one of my unused domains.

I've been using this site to read about various systems and it is quite well rated.

http://php.opensourcecms.com/scripts/show.php?catid=1&cat=CMS%20/%20Portals

[cmcp]

I'm currently revisiting Expression Engine, and it's impressing me so far.

[Damian E]

Hiya Lee, Barrowmatt,

Thanks for your replies. What I really liked about Concrete5 was the in-context editing aspect and the real ease which you can click on an object in the content and change things without any experience. I'm concerned that with a lot of CMS solutions there is a huge learning curve for the client when you hand over the project. I've done a lot of reading on the subject and appreciate the site link.

Unfortunately with Concrete5 there isn't the same depth of support as some of the bigger names which is why I was wondering if anyone had any experience with it and any issues when it comes to templates.

[Astaroth]

From experience (though it is mainly in .Net CMSs rather than PHP) most are fairly straight forward for maintaining standard pages/ using blogs etc. Certainly differences start to come in when the clients want to modify menu options/ orders etc and when you start to include much more complex things which require multiple modules to achieve a single task then the learning curve is often very steep.

A lot will depend on the complexity of the project and the reality of how much maintanance they are likely to going to be doing.

[webhostuk]

Hello,

We have worked on Drupal and Joomla both are excellent.

[Page]

If you want simple then wordpress is good and might even be a good start and then onto joomla if they need all that power.

post no blogs and just enter pages to use it as a web site

plus updates and add ons are a breeze to install

[franz]

Take a close gander at concrete5..

Full disclosure, I run the project. That being said..

1) I found this post and took the time to reply to it. That level of hands on community help is common across the developers in our forums and IRC. No, we're not the size of drupal or joomla - but there's over 17,000 members in the forums - we're not going anywhere.

2) The editing interface you're going to end up giving your client is far and above easier to use than anything else listed here or I've seen. Just setup a trial at concrete5.org/about/trial and you'll get why people like it in about 10 seconds of usage.. See a typo, fix a typo.. In-context editing that works is glorious. When your client is scared of using their website, you've failed to deliver control over the medium to them. The permissions, version control, and stable MVC architecture under the hood means your client will be able to play around with new ideas on their website in relative safety.

3) The add-ons all actually work. Not to single out drupal, but having 3000 addons is nothing to be proud of if installing any one of them means installing any of the others will break your site. Our add-on marketplace /does/ have commercial add-ons, which does get some open source folks hot under the collar. However, everything you're going to download there will actually behave on your site, won't destroy some other add-on, and if you paid something for it, you'll get the support you need or your money back. I have yet to see another open source project even try to deliver on that promise.

4) concrete5 does a lot out of the box in the free core without any add-ons. A lot of what's already built in the core consistently you need to use a number of modules to achieve even with more popular systems. Advanced permissions, version control, a customizeable attribute system, file versioning, etc etc...

5) I try to make lists in groups of five for obvious reasons..

I'll stop shilling here, just give concrete5 a close look. We're reworking our documentation right now and a new version is coming out in the coming weeks that's even better.

best wishes.
-frz

[Damian E]

Hiya Franz,

Thanks for the reply. I've now started work on the project and have opted for Concrete5. I'm just working on the theme at the moment and I'm already finding the interface very user friendly. The site I'm working on is to be a focus for people of all ages and abilities so I really needed to keep the user experience as simple as possible.

Cheers,

Damian

[FreelanceSoftwareDeveloper]

I've also being playing with Concrete5 since I came across this post.

Very impressed with the user interface, it really is client friendly.

I've found it very simple to take a HTML template and convert it to a Concrete5 format.

I also found it fairly simple to take a block and modify it, then install it as a custom block.

[Damian E]

Don't suppose anyone has come across a font magnifier add-on have they? It's the one thing I was really hoping to find as the brief included an awareness of visual impairment and I think this would really help out.

Cheers,

Damian

[pixelfish]

Hi Damian,

When you refer to a font magnifier, if you mean for accessibility you need the user to be able to increase or decrease font size, then check out the concrete5 add-on named 'font scaler'. You will find it in the marketplace. I believe its free. Hopefully this is what you mean?

We are UK Concrete5 specialists, so if you need any help pop over to our website concrete5cms.com and browse the blog or send us a question.

many thanks

[pixelfish]

Hi Damian,

Do you want your users to be able to increase/decrease the font size for accessibility reasons? If so the Concrete5 marketplace has a free add-on named 'Font Scaler' which would do the trick.