Well you may have noticed our concrete5.org site was being "renovated" for the last 24 hours. With the amount of community activity we've been having, we just couldn't find a reasonable way to stage and launch our updates any more gracefully, so thanks for bearing with us through this interruption in services. We'll do everything we can to avoid it in the future.
Here's just some of what changed:

  • We completely revamped the home page and several landing pages to give the site a more friendly experience to the non-programmers out there. We also changed the footer around to be a bit more useful and friendly for everyone.
  • A Marketplace now exists! You can browse Themes and Add-Ons, fill a shopping cart with them, make a real purchase with a credit card and instantly download the files.
  • If you are a developer or designer selling something in the Marketplace, you now get credits in your account which you can choose to have paid out via paypal, or you can use to make other purchases around the site. You also get your own forums and ticketing system so you can provide ongoing support to your customers.
  • Forums & Tickets got a bunch of small UI tweaks to make life easier. We now can easily set status of feature requests and bugs without going into edit mode. You can now drag and drop the posting window around your browser so you can see what you're replying to as you write (that one used to drive me up the wall.)
  • We added member search, buffed out the profile, and introduced 23 new member "badges" that represent expertise and interest. Now you'll be able to see if that person giving you advice actually knows what they're talking about.
  • We added a local user group map and search. If you want to have a physical monthly meeting of c5 folk in your area, we want to hear from you and link to you on our map.
  • We put alot of work into making search more useful (i.e.: not suck so much). It's still got some ways to go, but it is way better than what we had.
  • We seeded the marketplace with a bunch of free blocks we've made after listening to real world requests.
  • Rearranged help and added some new screen-casts and articles.
  • We added c5hosting and c5services Partner Program areas.

uhh I'm sure lots of little things I'm completely spacing because it's all a blur at this point. Any rate, let us know if anything is off. Thanks for bearing with us while we rolled all that out.

-frz