Do I love concrete5?
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I'm in the middle of a love / hate relationship at the moment...
I'm fully behind concrete5, and will persevere using it for a personal site, but for my client I think I'm going to go back to Joomla..
I know I should provide reasons so below :
lack of extensions / adddons - Joomla has more, and is not in a situation where you necessarily have to pay for a good addon
forum experts - Joomla has more, sorry..
speed - sometimes it just seems slow
Having said that, I am going to redesign my personal site on concrete5 just to get to know the ins and outs and all the behind scenes code, and I hope to move my client across soon after!
adec
I'm fully behind concrete5, and will persevere using it for a personal site, but for my client I think I'm going to go back to Joomla..
I know I should provide reasons so below :
lack of extensions / adddons - Joomla has more, and is not in a situation where you necessarily have to pay for a good addon
forum experts - Joomla has more, sorry..
speed - sometimes it just seems slow
Having said that, I am going to redesign my personal site on concrete5 just to get to know the ins and outs and all the behind scenes code, and I hope to move my client across soon after!
adec
frz as I said I will continue to use it for my pers site because I believe it has a future.
One of my concerns as a 'new' CMS is the lack of open source belief. Too many people charging $20 for an addon to make a quick buck.
If you compare the Joomla extensions to the Concrete5 addons.. you will easily see where there is a mismatch.
I think you do have a cool CMS here.. but to make it a true competitior we need to share the wealth of knowledge when creating sites.. not just 'read the doc'
I'm moving between the UK and the US atm, but when settled, I intend to start posting all the code snippets I use to help people, not turn them into a market place addon..
One of my concerns as a 'new' CMS is the lack of open source belief. Too many people charging $20 for an addon to make a quick buck.
If you compare the Joomla extensions to the Concrete5 addons.. you will easily see where there is a mismatch.
I think you do have a cool CMS here.. but to make it a true competitior we need to share the wealth of knowledge when creating sites.. not just 'read the doc'
I'm moving between the UK and the US atm, but when settled, I intend to start posting all the code snippets I use to help people, not turn them into a market place addon..
Whelp:
1) Actually all of these systems have paid add-ons. DotNetNuke, Joomla, even Drupal & Wordpress all have an active community of folk who sell add-ons/modules/themes/whatever you want to call em. They may not have a deeply integrated marketplace with support systems built in, and they may humph and haw about the GPL and whatnot, but people sell stuff and make a living on these other CMS's too. This is software, not utopia.
Our marketplace works well because over 60% of the folks downloading things from it can't write a line of PHP - they're "site owners" and they just want stuff that works. The whole "you pay for support" model to open source puts a terrible burden on the business folks who just need a product that behaves well in the first place. If you are a capable programmer you should be able to do quite a lot with concrete5's core. If you're not, is it really the end of the world to pay $15 for some drop downs and the support we give with it? I think not.
2) The marketplace has funded our development. 90% of our costs are covered entirely by the marketplace revenue today. That lets me keep a crew of half a dozen actually working on improving the core, the community site, and our add-ons. We don't rely on donations from agencies to do things, we don't have a VC master.
3) Half the stuff in the marketplace is free. Seriously, order it Price: Low to High and enjoy. Sure, you can buy an image gallery from us and if you create a support request you'll get an answer within 2 days. You can also install gallaria for for free and get support in a week or two from asmiller08 who gave his add-on away for free, and is now giving his support time away for free too..
Both work. I agree it's important that their be free stuff for people who are willing to invest more DIY energy. I also of course agree that learning is important and that's why you see us regularly add things to the how-to section that include free blocks we certainly could have sold (ie:
http://www.concrete5.org/documentation/how-tos/developers/change-bl... )
So I totally get that we've positioned ourself a little to the side of where other projects do at this point in their lifecycle.. buuuut..
No, what we're doing here isn't revolutionary, everyone does it they just don't do it quite the way we do.
Yes, what we're doing here is working...
And yes, it's working well enough that folks like ZDNet.uk get it:
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/blogs/web-design-and-free-software-10004587/...
Poorly written article for sure, but the author seems to get the point. Is it really better to have everything be "free" at the cost of things working in an easy fashion? At that point, is it really free? Certainly not to the small business that wants a site and now needs to spend hundreds or thousands to get something configured with another system that might have cost $55 here. Probably also not to the developer who has to spend weeks instead of hours getting basic stuff to work with spotty support.
Any rate. There's a page in our about section on this, I'm not supposed to rant about this any more - it's an old issue.
Over time I think you'll see more and more quality UI stuff for free in the marketplace, and more prebuilt solutions for businesses with higher prices in there as well.
There's also a few different groups working on approaches to improving concrete5's performance on slow webhosts.
I totally don't mean this to sound snappy, it's not intended to be. There's two kids screaming at me and I haven't had coffee so I haven't had a lot of time to reread this to see if my tone could be misinterpreted. You raise good points that we've thought long and hard about. I think its true that some people see add-ons that cost money and get turned off, I just wanted to share how important this has been to our success as well.
1) Actually all of these systems have paid add-ons. DotNetNuke, Joomla, even Drupal & Wordpress all have an active community of folk who sell add-ons/modules/themes/whatever you want to call em. They may not have a deeply integrated marketplace with support systems built in, and they may humph and haw about the GPL and whatnot, but people sell stuff and make a living on these other CMS's too. This is software, not utopia.
Our marketplace works well because over 60% of the folks downloading things from it can't write a line of PHP - they're "site owners" and they just want stuff that works. The whole "you pay for support" model to open source puts a terrible burden on the business folks who just need a product that behaves well in the first place. If you are a capable programmer you should be able to do quite a lot with concrete5's core. If you're not, is it really the end of the world to pay $15 for some drop downs and the support we give with it? I think not.
2) The marketplace has funded our development. 90% of our costs are covered entirely by the marketplace revenue today. That lets me keep a crew of half a dozen actually working on improving the core, the community site, and our add-ons. We don't rely on donations from agencies to do things, we don't have a VC master.
3) Half the stuff in the marketplace is free. Seriously, order it Price: Low to High and enjoy. Sure, you can buy an image gallery from us and if you create a support request you'll get an answer within 2 days. You can also install gallaria for for free and get support in a week or two from asmiller08 who gave his add-on away for free, and is now giving his support time away for free too..
Both work. I agree it's important that their be free stuff for people who are willing to invest more DIY energy. I also of course agree that learning is important and that's why you see us regularly add things to the how-to section that include free blocks we certainly could have sold (ie:
http://www.concrete5.org/documentation/how-tos/developers/change-bl... )
So I totally get that we've positioned ourself a little to the side of where other projects do at this point in their lifecycle.. buuuut..
No, what we're doing here isn't revolutionary, everyone does it they just don't do it quite the way we do.
Yes, what we're doing here is working...
And yes, it's working well enough that folks like ZDNet.uk get it:
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/blogs/web-design-and-free-software-10004587/...
Poorly written article for sure, but the author seems to get the point. Is it really better to have everything be "free" at the cost of things working in an easy fashion? At that point, is it really free? Certainly not to the small business that wants a site and now needs to spend hundreds or thousands to get something configured with another system that might have cost $55 here. Probably also not to the developer who has to spend weeks instead of hours getting basic stuff to work with spotty support.
Any rate. There's a page in our about section on this, I'm not supposed to rant about this any more - it's an old issue.
Over time I think you'll see more and more quality UI stuff for free in the marketplace, and more prebuilt solutions for businesses with higher prices in there as well.
There's also a few different groups working on approaches to improving concrete5's performance on slow webhosts.
I totally don't mean this to sound snappy, it's not intended to be. There's two kids screaming at me and I haven't had coffee so I haven't had a lot of time to reread this to see if my tone could be misinterpreted. You raise good points that we've thought long and hard about. I think its true that some people see add-ons that cost money and get turned off, I just wanted to share how important this has been to our success as well.
It's not really a quick buck- they can take hours to make, and the reason people give stuff away for more popular frameworks is that they want their products to stand out amongst the crowd and to be liked and popular.
Try to teach a client how to use Joomla with all those modules and you'll have your answer.
Speaking from personal experience, I think you need to stick with it. I came and went a couple of years back, wish I'd stayed in the fold and really gotten to grips with C5 like I'm trying to do now. For one thing, I might have made a few more quid in the marketplace :D
It's just a pleasure to be considered a competitive option after just 2.5 years as an open source project.