concrete5 5.6

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This is not acceptable in any way.
No try, no buy, next one please ..-.

@jack, I totally agree. I work for a large US communications provider, and enjoy developing in-house tools and whatnot. I was given the task of deploying a mini-intranet for our dept. I demo'd over ten different CMS frameworks, and Concrete5 was a joy to work w/ but became too cumbersome as I added layers of functionality. I ended up creating a wiki w/ Dokuwiki and just dev my own plugins when I need something extra. You can quickly have a site up and running w/ Concrete5, but the levels of abstraction become apparent as your site grows. NOTE: I wish Concrete5's editor and developer's guides were in wiki format!! This would ease the growing pains, but then again I'm a manual junkie!

Easy - but has a few security problems.
Switched to WordPress, which is also very easy to use.

Same here, but there are other CMS here - take a look to Redaxscript

Far to complex. I ditched it in less then a minute after installing it and playing around with it.

I love Concrete5 . It's easy and very nice design!!!

In response to carlos
I have had several exchanges with carlos, and one of the things that he didn't like was the mvc architecture, whereas wordpress has much more of a straight path, concrete5 steps through lots of function and helpers to generate your final output. MVC is very easy to understand if you understand the basic theories around it and the order files will be called in. That being said- the documentation is pretty weak, and it definitely takes time poking through the files to take full advantage of the features. BUT- I very strongly disagree with this line
>But if you are like me, and want to have a CMS do your bidding to allow
>you to create most anything you want on a web site with a minimum of
>fuss and with relatively easy PHP code to understand and modify...think
>twice about this CMS.
I think that this is the best feature of concrete5 actually. I find that concrete5 is best for small or really complex sites, its the middle that it has trouble scaling to. When used for very small sites, you can often just use the core blocks and maybe 1 or 2 others to build- very easy. For medium sites, you often want a couple custom blocks and some core hacks. I find this to be very stringy, and can be troublesome to find small bits of the core that are causing bugs. Also, since you aren't fully invested in the api for these sites, you don't fully understand the inner mechanisms. For really complicated apps, concrete5 scales really well to. C5 was built around a framework, and it includes zend, so you can really build anything. The concrete5.org site is a perfect example. It has around 80,000 users each with their own customizable profile page, a marketplace and marketplace submission, a blog, how to section, showcase, karma, and a forum with thousands of posts. Everything was built off of c5, and is possible with some time and energy.

Re: Carlos's post

Just to be clear, concrete5 is Object Oriented and was built to handle enterprise level needs. There's all sorts of Zend framework libraries included, and it was architected from the bottom up to be a flexible building material that you can use to create anything. You can override the core cms files without jeopardizing your ability to upgrade later, you can even use multiple dispatchers across different servers if you only need SOME pages in your infrastructure to be editable. Comparing it to Wordpress, which is a great blogging script, is simply apples and oranges.

Sure, Wordpress has been around forever in web years, and to be frank, for blogging is simply a great way to go. concrete5 on the other hand has been open source for only a couple years and was listed as the fastest growing open source community in 2010:

http://www.waterandstone.com/book/2010-open-source-cms-market-share-report

There are hundreds of thousands of sites built with concrete5 today, many of which had no developers involved at all. A casual glance through our showcase will make it obvious that a client who has some DIY energy and flexible design requirements can easily get started, and finished on their own.

All of that being said, yes I agree documentation is always a chore and could stand to be improved. We're working on it!

I use concrete5 since end 2010 and my opinion is that this CMS is the greatest of the CMS (sorry i a fan of this cms). or mayby it doesn t exist a CMS like concrete5.
that is just my opinion but they is not other cms that is so simple for the end user (and the developer too) and in the same time very powerfull.
And to answer to other comments who say that concrete5 is slow, I invite you to check it by your self, just go to the
gtmetrix.com website to check website speed. For exemple for concrete5.org the average display time result is 2-3 second.
With some simple code optimisation: for exemple "gzip file compression" a concrete5 website is competitive in relation to page speed..

I'm surprised that in the messages about how this CMS is that no one has commented (that I can see) about how good of a CMS system it is for the web developer. Yes...it's great that it's easy for an end user to do certain things through the admin interface. To click a button here and there and have Concrete5 do something.

It's definitely good there within the constraints of what Concrete5 is set up to do through clicking of buttons.

Concrete5 takes the whole point and click thing to a new level.

But let me tell you...as a web developer myself...working with the underlying code is a major pain in the butt!

The code is poorly documented, uses variables here and there all over the place whose origin you have no clue about, and is incredibly complex in places. It can be like trying to unravel spaghetti to try and figure out where to make a change that one wants to the code.

If you operate within the constraints of the normal and expected...it's great.

But if you are like me, and want to have a CMS do your bidding to allow you to create most anything you want on a web site with a minimum of fuss and with relatively easy PHP code to understand and modify...think twice about this CMS.

I have a huge amount of time invested in C5 at this point and may stay with it for that reason but if I had to do it over again...I am not at all certain that I would have gone with this CMS as my CMS of choice. The underlying code is way too complex, not intuitive as to how they do things in many places, and very, very difficult to work with respecting the things that I have been wanting to do (which are not all that unique but definitely out of the bounds of the normal and expected).

The forum is great for relatively simple questions (and some not so simple). Some great people there.

But on the negative side (to balance out all the wow and positive comments here) a fair number of my posts never get answers. The forum is puny compared to many like WordPress, which has a huge forum.

Sometimes you are left to figure things out on your own which can be very time consuming and frustrating.

Also I was surprised to find that this CMS, though growing in popularity, is used by something like less than 1% of web sites out there (I can't recall the site I saw that at...just Google for market penetration of CMS or some such).

WordPress on the other hand, somewhat astonishnly, is used by something like 59% of sites out there.

So take that into account as well. While WordPress may be a big, in some ways bloated CMS, there is a reason why it has grown so big and continues to grow.

For clients who will not be the kind that will pay me ungoing fees to maintain and help them with their websites...I recommend WordPress for them. Every time.

Concrete5 is not a CMS that an end client can work with entirely on their own. Where you can let a client lose to work on their sites themselves for the life of their sites (after you build it initially). When a client gets to the limits of what Concrete5 does out of the box and needs some customizations...they are going to be lost. Good for me I guess in that they will pay me more money to help them out but I guess what I am saying is that this CMS is not an endlessly easy to work with forever type of CMS for end clients (as some comments here might lead you to believe).

To be sure there is no such CMS but I just want to balance out the range of comments here that might lead one to believe that they have found the holy grail of CMS's.

Concrete5 is good in some things, great in others, but also a royal pain to work with in some other respects.

It's all relative to what you are wanting to do with it.

Carlos

You can scale easily over 10k pages. There are a lot of sites hosting more than 1k pages. Even sites with more than 10k or 100k pages.
Simply forget about Will. =)

Nice interface, easy to add plugins, but not very good if you want to scale.

For a 5-10 page site it's okay, beyond that forget it.

I highly recommend Concrete5 - I've been using it for about two years now.

People with slow sites have either not optimised them properly or are on cheap/crappy hosting.

Concrete5 flies for me. Check out the forums for tips on optimisation.

shield wrote: "I suggest that developers of concrete5 keep in mind there's a difference between user-friendly and admin-friendly. This CMS fits the latter but Google eveluates sites based on the user experience."

MY REPLY: The user experience that you're talking about is the experience of the visitor to the site, not the manager of its content.

And I don't even know WHAT to say about someone whose logical (if one can even use that word, in this case) brain pathways lead him/her to the place where s/he thinks that the solution to a slow hosting provider is to change CMSs to something faster. Oy.

The provider is obviously putting too many (or at least too many busy) web sites on a single server. You simply need to document the slowless, and then demand to be put on either a less busy, or less populated (or, preferably both) shared server.

Or, even better, hook-up with a hosting provider who would never do a thing like that; someone with integrity, who defines that term as doing the right thing even when no one's watching. Hosting providers to overbook servers, so they can squeeze every possible penny out of them, aren't interested in hosting. They're interested, rather, in money; and ONLY money. If they could convince you to just give it to them, without actually providing a service, trust me, they would.

You need, then, to leave that hosting provider now, regardless whether it would move you if you asked, because hosting providers who understand what it means to operate with integrity would NEVER overbook a server. Never.


_________________________________
Gregg L. DesElms
Napa, California USA

I'm disappointed...very slow

The only reason I'm looking for an alternate CMS is that my host has become slow (and I'm not ready to move to another host yet) so before packing my bag I need a fast CMS just in case my next host slows down as well.

I suggest that developers of concrete5 keep in mind there's a difference between user-friendly and admin-friendly. This CMS fits the latter but Google eveluates sites based on the user experience.

To quote from the film Gladiator, "Win the crowd".

Concrete5 should win the crowd... the end user.