Announcements

Well if you've been paying attention to concrete5.org recently you've seen some fairly cool new stuff like the Karma system. Now we're launching a weekly video show "Totally Random" where we share news on concrete5 and interesting things we bump into along the way. Check out our super rough but amusing pilot here:

Hey gang,

Just a quick note to announce some new add-ons & themes in our marketplace:
eCommerce 1.7.1 a new version that supports with support for optional checkout parameters, price-affecting customer choices (e.g. size XL adds $3 to base cost) and more currency formatting.

Digital Downloads 1.0 and add-on for eCommerce that lets you securely offer digital files to your customers after purchase.

RSS Feed Manager Create and configure rich-text feeds for your site.

Tell a Friend Form Cross promotion for your site.

Search Tools A searchable page list interface.

Highslide Web Album Another cool image gallery

Dojo Storyboard designer Make a wireframe/cartoon like storyboard

And a bunch of new Themes too:

Splash
Diamond
Silk
Camilo
Creme includes eCommerce templates!
Instill
Pluralism

Thanks to all our 3rd part developers for helping grow concrete5!

This was fun!

Got to talk about how and why concrete5 got started, what my own background is, and what makes a startup work. It's always flattering to be called a "go-getter."

Here's the link to the site: http://www.go-getters.ideatewith.com

Also, here's the iTunes link: http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/go-getters/id337491910

Revolutionary Device Simplifies the Architecture Process for ‘Problem Clients'

Portland, OR (PRWEB) April 1, 2010 concrete5 is an open source content management system that powers over 35,000 websites from tiny churches to major institutions and startups. Now the concrete CMS team has created a new appliance to deliver project success with even the most difficult client.

The process of using a Web Architecture Appliance (WAA) is nothing short of shocking. A base concrete5 install is setup on a webserver, and connected to a computer using the WAA via USB. The client simply lays one hand on the sensor on top, and starts describing their vision for the site in their own tone.

"Leveraging this level of synergy has been a dream of mine for ages," says Lead Developer Ryan Tyler. "I've had clients who just couldn't communicate in real terms at all. I can't count the times I've heard ‘I'm not really sure but you know what I'm talking about' on a fixed budget. Well I don't, but now I can hook them up to the WAA and problem solved. It's amazing."

Andrew Embler, CTO explains "hardware is not easy, and certainly inferring what someone actually needs when the direction is ‘it needs more buttons' is no small challenge either. That's why we knew we had to do this. "

Learn more about the WAA here.

http://concrete5.org/waa

Open Source CMS concrete5 Gets Even Sexier to Use, and Catches the Eye of Drupal and Joomla! Developers at SXSW.

Portland, OR (PRWEB) March 29, 2010 — concrete CMS was commercial software that went open source in late 2008, quickly winning project of the month on SourceForge and much attention from a community of open source fans used to dealing with painful user experiences and scattered code. During the last year the core team behind concrete5 has been flushing out features in their CMS, along with building an active community and marketplace at concrete5.org. Now with the release of version 5.4 concrete5 has really hit its stride and the core team expects continued great growth this summer.

concrete5 powers over 35,000 websites today, with a developer community some 18,000 members strong. "We've grown very quickly since going open source," says CTO Andrew Embler. "The core application has always been very stable, but in the past we knew there were a few areas we wanted to clean up. With the sitemap improvements and even faster AJAX editing in 5.4 we've really covered the big items on my radar. "

Some architectural changes to better support the needs of enterprise level clients have already allowed some larger organizations to choose concrete5 over Drupal, Joomla!, and Wordpress. The additional changes to fully embrace the Zend framework by using Zend Cache and Zend Translate has proven well worth the investment.

"It was great fun showing off the release candidate of 5.4 at SXSW:Interactive this year,' says Franz Maruna, CEO. "We met a lot of Joomla! and Drupal developers who begrudgingly gave us 5 minutes to see the competition, only to walk away 20 minutes later lamenting about time they'd wasted on other systems. I think we showed quite a few people that you can build big powerful sites with concrete5 that really are easy to use."

See the complete feature list in 5.4 here:
https://www.concretecms.com/documentation/background/version_history/version-5-4-0/

About concrete5
concrete CMS is a leading developer of next- generation open source solutions for web sites. The company's flagship product, concrete5, combines the ease-of-use of a blogging platform with the flexibility and power of a web development platform. To date, thousands of advertising and creative agencies and web developers around the world have downloaded concrete5 for free and used the technology to quickly and inexpensively build enterprise-quality web sites that can be updated by end users. concrete CMS is a privately held company based in Portland, Oregon, and manages the concrete5.org project. For more information, please visit https://www.concretecms.com.

Contact:
Franz Maruna
503-235-0606
franz (at) concrete5.org

Hey Gang,

I'm writing you from lovely Austin TX as we wrap up our exhibit hall stuff at SXSW. It's been super fun and a LOT of people seem really excited about concrete5. We've met plenty of directors of huge companies and consultancies, new media reporters, all sorts of folks, but often its the Joomla developers who have the most amusing response. After starting slow with a "I guess I'll check it out" and then going through a couple "Holy-Moly its that easy?!?" moments they end up leaving somewhat disgruntled. "Where the h#ll have you guys been? I just wasted 2 years learning Joomla and it took me 10 minutes to get as far as it took me 2 weeks to do in it!".. That's good stuff.

Thought we should also let everyone know we FINALLY re-did our documentation and it's waaaay better now. We still have some pages we want to add, but now everything is nicely organized and makes sense with a cool slidey jump nav. We even hooked it into our forum system using some tags and a "helpful answer" system so instead of those annoying guestbook comments that just grew out of control, our doc pages can start discussions that remain encapsulated but are still searchable.

concrete5.4 is out as a Release Candidate now so you should certainly check that out and let us know if its ready to ship. We think it just about is.

Thanks for your attention,

best

-frz

ps: here's pics from SXSW.

concrete5.org now features much improved documentation, both for developers and for end users.

https://www.concretecms.com/documentation/

No more developer docs separated from user docs. Tags also make it easy to cross-reference pages with forum posts that refer to them. Related discussions marked as helpful should also float toward the top on their related docs pages. Much, much more (and sensibly organized) developer content. No more "page coming soon" messages. Search should also be much improved.

This thing on?? * tap-tap *

Wow, it's been an embarrassingly long time since anyone looked at this wordpress blog. First, lets pass out blame for that:

• Time once you have children it stops being endless.
• Twitter who knows what that thing is gonna become, but it does kinda take a big slice of motivation out of anyone posting to a blog. While crafting the perfect 140 characters isn't "easy," it does always seem like the shortest path when you have something new to announce. I'm not arguing that's right, there's certainly a lot of crap content with no real voice there but still. I think every one's kinda knee jerking over there for news announcements these days.
• Do concrete5 and WP compete? Sure kinda. I guess we say we do on our about page, so *shrugs*. We've talked about this here in the past. My view is concrete5 is a flexible CMS (legos), while Wordpress is a really nice Blog (Barbie). Both have value. We never tried to recreate the blog editing experience with concrete5 but along came some 3rd party developers to do just that. Now there's kinda an unspoken question of why our blog isn't in concrete5 and frankly the answer is just Time, again.
• Me. The buck stops here..

So what's happened since MAY of last year??! Ugh.. well.. a lot!

• Launched the marketplace, had it grow dramatically, fueled by the work of 3rd party developers as much as us.
• Rebuilt the way we do hosting and started developing a true server management application for running multiple concete5 installs on a box.
• Launched a few versions of concrete5 that changed around all sorts of stuff nicely.
• Launched eCommerce add-on, Launched Discussion Forums
• Built a concrete5 cyborg that is laying waste to the American west.

Okay so that last one was a lie, but what's going on right now?

• We're just about halfway towards our fund-raising goal for going to SXSW! Thanks to all our donors.
• We were just given a few pages in The New Rules of Marketing & PR by David Meerman Scott. I guess transparency and community are the new big things in marketing, and happily we're good at ‘em already! It's certainly worth picking this up if you're trying to bring your company into the 21st century he does a great job covering everything in detail.

What's next?

Meh. I'm all tuckered, this is waaay more than 140 characters.. you'll just have to stay tuned to find out.

We want to show off concrete5 at SXSW, and we could really use some help getting there.

We've never asked for much beyond your attention since we went free and open source some 18 months ago. We've gone from a dozen clients around Oregon to over 100,000 downloads and 25,000 active sites with almost 14,000 members in our forums - we've built something people love and depend on.

Yesterday, I was lamenting the fact that searching concrete5.org (specifically, finding the search input field on the website) wasn't as easy as I thought it ought to be.

Todd, one of our excellent developers, came up with a great solution for those who use Firefox: a custom Firefox search plugin. His original used google.com to search concrete5.org, and while I can appreciate that, I'm hoping that our search has improved to the point where that's not necessary. With that in mind, I've tweaked it so that it searches concrete5.org directly.

Download the concrete5 Firefox Search Plugin

Installing the search plugin:

The following instructions assume that your copy of Firefox is in a standard location.

First, download concrete5.xml above, and then

On Windows: Copy it to "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins"

On OS X: Copy it to "/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/searchplugins"

Restart Firefox and concrete5 should appear in the search engine list, below the search field, complete with a nice icon. Thanks again, Todd. You may have even given me a reason to occasionally ditch Safari.