New C5 convert

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Like many Drupal developers I'm borderline fanatical about how awesome Drupal is. So extensible, so powerful... except for one problem that I recently discovered. It doesn't stack up against C5 at all.

I'm actually feeling a bit foolish for choosing Drupal over C5 back in 2010 when I started my firm. Now don't get me wrong, we've done some great projects in Drupal and learning it has been a good experience overall. But I really think a CMS needs to do a good job of catering to all types of users, including designers, marketing, content managers as well as developers. I see that user support in C5 in ways I don't see it in Drupal and other CMS systems.

 
mesuva replied on at Permalink Reply
mesuva
That's cool to hear.

Don't feel foolish, I'm sure many of us here that now use concrete5 for both basic sites and more complex development wish we had found it earlier!

With custom page attributes, the composer, page types, custom blocks, packages, global areas, template overrides and a very extensive api, I'm finding that most custom tasks in concrete5 are highly achievable.

But the big difference is that when I do develop something a bit custom, I'm still able to set it up in a way that is easy to manage for a client/end user.

Your Drupal experience could be very useful on this forum, I'd be interested to hear what it does well and what things you might think are missing from concrete5 that drupal does. (I've only casually played around with Drupal). In many ways it would be handy to have documented for others some common development tasks that would be done in Drupal, but for concrete5.
frz replied on at Permalink Reply
frz
That's awesome to hear. Thank you!


I'd love to have a how-to geared for drupal developers. Something that
explained the power of page types, custom attributes, defaults and
stacks in a way that makes sense to someone familiar with drupal.

Can you help?


best wishes

Franz Maruna
CEO - concrete5.org
http://about.me/frz
goldhat replied on at Permalink Reply
That sounds like a great idea and that sort of information will be a natural byproduct of my learning C5. I'd be glad to put some of those details together into a set of articles or a wiki, or some other format.

I think an introduction to the general equivalency for each major Drupal feature might be a good place to start. Maybe we could call it something like C5 Quickstart Guide for Drupal Developers?
frz replied on at Permalink Reply
frz
Yes thats exactly what I'm looking for.

Do you one better, whoever writes the first good one and submits it to
the PRB gets a t-shirt, awesome badge, and free ecommerce license from
us:

http://www.concrete5.org/index.php?cID(7386...
best wishes

Franz Maruna
CEO - concrete5.org
http://about.me/frz
ChrisH replied on at Permalink Reply
ChrisH
@frz I started using c5 in late 2010 with a Drupal background and also thought some quick start docs would be great so I’m digging in.

My overall draft is pretty lengthy so I’m breaking it down into manageable chunks.

I’ve got a landing page here:

http://www.chrishvizdak.com/concrete5-for-drupal-designers-develope...

... a page on c5 features that are exciting from a Drupal perspective:

http://www.chrishvizdak.com/whats-great-about-concrete5-for-drupal-...

...and a page comparing the basics of page building:

http://www.chrishvizdak.com/drupal-concrete5-page-building-features...

Pages on deeper topics (CCK, Views, Panels) are coming along and all feedback is much appreciated.

Thanks!
frz replied on at Permalink Reply
frz
This is a fantastic article. Thank you so much for the work!

I think anything you could do to cover the concept of Single Pages in concrete5 would be a great last bit to cover the developer basics in broad strokes.

Thank you again for this awesome article. Well written and just the type of thing we're looking for.
goldhat replied on at Permalink Reply
That looks great Chris! I finally got around to making my first article on this today, titled Concrete5 from a Drupal Perspective,http://goldhat.ca/blog/concrete5-drupal-perspective...
frz replied on at Permalink Reply
frz
this is awesome. Thank you.

best wishes

Franz Maruna
CEO - concrete5.org
http://about.me/frz
PineCreativeLabs replied on at Permalink Reply
PineCreativeLabs
I, too, used Drupal for about half a year, prior to discovering Concrete in 2009.

I had found Drupal to be too confusing for an end-user, and it took me way too long to figure out how to do custom work.

Although Drupal is more structured than Concrete, I found that Concrete was superior for that very reason (among many others!). I liked the simplicity of Concrete.

I first discovered Concrete at OpenSourceCMS.com in 2009. I spent several months comparing it against Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress, and more than 20 other CMSs! Every time... Concrete = win!

I also agree that the support is far superior to any other CMS that I have ever seen, which is another reason I chose it over Drupal.

Today, my clients are very pleased with Concrete. I asked my clients why they liked Concrete, and they said it was because of the ease-of-use, and the overall quality of the product!