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.