Announcements

Yeah that's right. C5 rocks so amazingly hard that SourceForge decided to make us Project of The Month after only being on their site for 3 months! We've always thought of source forge as the Rolling Stone of open source so we took some liberties with our photos

Check out the whole article here!

Yay, THANK YOU SourceForge

you gotta see it, particularly the flash demo.

be a pal and pay us to host your site

Mark Moore says:

"Thanks for letting me play with C5 at OSCON. How many people did you meet that week? YIKES!!! I switched over from Drupal to C5 within a day. I am loving it! Thanks a bunch for the demo."

Here's his bike which looks equally fast oh wait, what's that on the front? Guess we're not the only ones who love c5, that's an awfully nice lookin' machine!

thanks Mark, you rock!

Want some c5 stickers and a multi-purpose "concrete5″ screwdriver too? Just drop us a line with your address. Stick your sticker somewhere equally cool, and send us a picture.

Ever since osCon08 we've been getting this question a lot. We even got it from the Drupal volunteers who essentially asked ‘with Drupal in the world, why would you even build another CMS?' I think the answer is pretty obvious from just watching the screencast or playing with the demo on concrete5.org, but here's some thoughts I've had with people via email recently:

We are thinking of using Drupal as a basis for a new portal/application server website and became aware of Concrete5.

I would be interested in a brief chat with someone regarding your views of the pros and cons of the two applications, and about some custom work and support for our projects if we decide to base it on Concrete5.

-nolet.com

Frz:

I think c5 is better than Drupal for any number of reasons:

1) It was a successful commercial product for years, so we were paid to throw bad ideas out. Most projects that are open source from the get go have to worry as much about politics as programming. We had the leisure of being paid to make mistakes and fix them for 5 years before giving the core framework away.

2) It actually does what you'd expect out of the box. Look we don't have thousands of developers working with it yet (I think?) but what's in c5 actually works well, it all looks and behaves as one, and it's going to let you solve 90% of the problems you're likely to run into building the average website. You don't have to be an expert in which module breaks which other modules in order to get a site built.

3) It's just as flexible and stable (arguably a good deal more so but I'm not a Drupal expert and am obviously biased). I can say from my experiences and everything we've been hearing from the community it's a good deal easier and more enjoyable for the end site owner to use. That means a lot when you're waiting for a check we know.

I'm sure there are a good many more reasons why so many people and shops are taking their Drupal powered sites and rebuilding them in c5, we'd love to hear them here. Is it just the UI, or is the development environment appealing as well? Is it the page types/themes architecture or just that permissions are bundled and you don't have to deal with thousands of competing modules? Is it our massively complete and impressive developer documentation?

We know a lot of people already prefer c5, reach out and tell us what we've done right and what we still need to work on. .. oh, and what you hate about Drupal, so we don't end up making the same mistakes as this grows.

SchoolPulse.com launched on time. We're cleaning up a lot of details around it, but we've also got a lot of c5 work to do. We need your help:

1) We're building a marketplace/community so if you're building blocks, making themes, or building sites with c5, tell us about yourself or your shop. There's a lot of exciting details around how this site will work, but we don't want to spill the beans. Suffice to say, you'll be able to sell stuff you've already made that works with c5, and you'll be able to find new work for hire as well. We'd like to launch this store with some real content, socontact us through the c5 site.

2) We're looking for solid hourly PHP contractors from around the world. We work online using a combination of IRC, IM, and a task management system if you write great code we don't really care where you do it from. If that sounds like your cup of tea, we'll want to see a resume and an example of something you've written to work with c5. You can reach us in #concrete5 on efNet, or through the forms on concrete5.org

3) Hosting providers? We're rolling out another server to deal with the requests we're getting through concrete5.org, but in the picture we'd love to have a partnership with an existing company for hosting. If you're part of a well established hosting company that's interesting in partnering, we'd love to hear from youtoo!

So exciting times folks! Just a couple of dashboard improvements left to do before we upload another build and drop the "beta" from the version number.

We've gone a little dark new builds of c5 since osCon because we've been fully dedicated to this rebuild of SchoolPulse.com. We're making it all out of c5 and it's gonna be sexy, easy to use, and provide a lot of great blocks back to the project. It's consumed every waking hour from everyone I know for the last two weeks and weekends. It's launching next week.

In the meantime, here's an email thread I had recently with a new c5 fan where I lay down some of the ideas and plans we've been putting together as we watch our baby take off here:

> General feedback was submitted to ConcreteCMS.com. Here is the information.
>
> Name: Dennis
> <stripped>
>
> congrats on your CMS! we are impressed and actually thinking about using it for our clients.
>
> we are a design agency based sydney australia and have a variety of clients, from local hairdressers to government departments. we are looking to use an open source cms to use for our small to medium sites. your system so far seems to be the most user friendly one.
>
> I have worked with other systems before, like joomla and wordpress, etc. now all of them have a massive following and ten thousand different modules, while your system seems to have a limited amount of modules (which is actually quite nice). but what if we need a certain module? could you develop it for us and can we re-use it on projects?
>
> let's say a blog writing an article, getting comments (display upon approval), etc is something like this already developed? if not how much would it be just an estimate as the specs are a bit vague obviously?
>
> and last but not least, would you feature us on your page as design partner if we return the favor?
>
> that's it for now from my side.
> looking forward to hearing from you.
>
> cheers
> dennis
> www.digitalgarden.com.au
>

Hey Dennis,

It's nice to hear from more folk as excited about c5 as we are. Thanks!

In short yes.

In detail:
1) I think c5 would be perfect for your shop. We too have been frustrated by the lack of coherent control, or scalable architecture in many of the CMS solutions available. We plan to always keep the core of c5 simple and approachable. It's our belief that most website development challenges can be solved with a dozen or two well architected blocks, and that's what we'll be shooting for as we continue to get to the "perfect core" in 2008.

2) We do have a guestbook and blog structure in a previous version of concrete that we'll be migrating as part of that "core tools" library, I'm sure. Also slated for that: more easily customized navigation controls, multi-lingual interface, a cleaned up advanced permission model (which right now has to be turned on and isn't quite as elegant as the rest of c5.) all sorts of more useful goodies..

3) We will be launching a marketplace for blocks and themes shortly as well. If you as a third party developer are interested in making and reselling either, you'll be able to do it there easily. We'll also have a job board and something similar to etsy.com's alchemy where you can request or pledge for developments to c5 that other developers could build for. We're thinking there will be a 10% commission for the c5 core team, and there may be paid placement opportunities on that site as it matures as well.

4) There will also be a hosting site. It won't be the cheapest place in town, but it will have a very stable centralized version of c5 running with some nice backup/redundancy options.

5) I would love to feature your email and this reply on our blog at concreteTheStudio.com if that's amenable to you. Show me some sites built out of c5 and we'll talk about the Support page of concrete5.org, if you're interested in that as well.

if you're ever in pdx, beers on me.

thx again
-frz
ps: i love your site. nicely done.

Well no one on our end posted to you, because you're quite clear that Beta projects shouldn't be posted in your rules and yes.. we read rules.. sometimes.

However, someone from your end must of been at osCon because we appeared on your site a few days ago. Here's a snapshot of our google analytics for the last month:

Gotta say, we were gonna wait till we had a release we were calling final before posting to you,OpenSourceCMS.com. The fact that we just magically showed up is great! We'll just take that as a pat on the back that what we consider Beta is pretty damn stable, and we'd like to say thanks.

(ps: hey reader, wanna help? vote for us on their site. when they first added us they linked to our demo in such a way that it wouldn't work so we got some low votes that are messing up our average.)

So we're all home relaxing after two grueling days at OSCON. Maybe "grueling" is the wrong word; we had a great time and met a lot of really interesting people, and we got to talk our jaws off about Concrete5. (The phrase "PHP-based content management system" becomes kind of a tongue-twister after a while.) I didn't get much of a chance to check out the other exhibitors' booths, because we had a constant stream of people checking out our stuff and I felt compelled to verbally inundate them all with how great Concrete5 is. I did, however, get a chance to utterly destroy Franz at a two-foot-high game of chess, met and Facebook-friended Facebook, and gave a whole lot of people screwdrivers. If any of you OSCON attendees find your way over here, thanks for giving Concrete5 such a warm reception. We're worn out, but we had a blast.