Announcements

(Pulled from here: https://www.concretecms.com/about/our_philosophy/a-letter-to-php-developers/)

Hi,

I'm Franz, I used to be a developer, now I write emails. I was programming logo in first grade, I was running BBS's in the 80's, hacking together sites with SSI and PHPv3 in the 90's. Now I run concrete5.org with Andrew, who grew up hacking IRC and has worked with me for over a decade. We built concrete5 after years of consulting and frustration with other systems.

I know there are thousands of content management systems, and the learning curve for any new system is a beast, so I applaud the fact that you've bothered to look for something new and have read this far at all. Let me tell you a few things about where we're coming from that might help you continue to find the energy to get under the hood of concrete5:

1. We talk about "path of least resistance" around the office a lot. This means creating elegant solutions to real problems. You can't get too high-level or you've just added a layer of confusion. You can't get too specific because you'll end up re-writing it constantly. It's about finding what the consistent elements of the challenge are and building a solution that addresses them while offering complete flexibility around everything else. Path of least resistance doesn't mean cutting corners, it means spending the time to understand a problem and create strong tools for building all the types of solutions you'll need in the future.
2. Object oriented code is a good means to an end but it's not the goal. The goal is having reusable code that someone can understand at a glance. If I had to spend 30 minutes looking for a single line of code that is buried 10 directories deep in a file with nothing else in it, chances are you've failed in meeting the goal, even though you're strictly OOP. That doesn't mean procedural is good, it just means quality is about thoughtful balance.
3. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. It's fun to brainstorm but lets not pretend every idea is a good one. I personally am the proud owner of many bad ideas. Every feature added means that much more risk of edge case bugs, so lets debate the value/cost ratio of that feature. Just because we're "open source" doesn't mean we're socialist hippies. Lets also not forget that the first 80% of building something is relatively fun and easy, it's the last 20% of dialing it in that will kill you.
4. Less is more. These are websites, not rocket-ships. A page on a website is just a page. While concrete5 certainly has a learning curve and you will need to invest a little energy to get started, you should find the number of concepts you have to grapple with to be far lower than what you've grown accustomed to.
5. From the ground up concrete5 was designed to be a CMS. We built this as our tool box to make picky agency clients happy. It's not a blog that people use as a CMS. It's not a news site that had features draped on it until it served no particular market and got dubbed a CMS. It is a well thought-out framework that was designed to let crazy clients manage a great looking website, with next to no training.

If you're hot under the collar right now because I just made it clear I'm not going to automatically approve your add-on when it doesn't follow standards, or that I've failed to understand that your computer science teacher is a god amongst men chances are you're going to find your developer glory elsewhere. If these points resonate with you, keep exploring. You'll find a nicely thought out system that follows MVC and OOP practices where they add value, and helps you get your job done faster and more effectively in the real world.

Best wishes
Franz Maruna
CEO, Concrete CMS Inc.

This Week's News

• Just one of many awesome showcase submissions - Loula Creates.
• We welcome six new add-ons and one new commercial theme to our marketplace: MailChimp, Goodsoil eCommerce Theme, Who's Online, Yosemite Theme, Terra Firma Theme, iCal template (for the calendaradd-on), Dojo Tour Dates and Dojo Google Translate.
• I released a new how-to detailing everything that can be done with the Auto-Nav block. It can also be read and commented on at andrewembler.com. If you've ever had a question about how the Auto-Nav works, what it's options mean, how to theme it or extend it, you should check out that primer.

It's our clear goal to get concrete5 on every well configured web server on earth. A nice script installing app called Softaculous has just added concrete5 to the stuff they support install for. That's great news to us and we're happy to be working directly with Softaculous so hopefully version updates will be smooth sailing for concrete5 fans.

Thanks Softaculous!

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.