Concrete5 - Is It Right For Me?
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Hi there,
I posted the following on the drupal site (http://drupal.org/node/336290) and rather than retyping, if you replace ‘Drupal’ with ‘Concrete5’ it will be applicable!!
“Hi there,
I’ve been looking at the beginner’s guide to Drupal and there’s something I can’t really determine, so hopefully someone here will be able to shed some light.
I’m putting together a site for a client and they require some form of basic CMS. I will put together the site and lay it out as per the design with CSS - and they just want the ability to change aspects of the text and pictures over time. The client is a building firm, so they will have a couple of overview portfolio pages with 6 overviews per page, then 12 more detailed pages linking off those two.
They’ll need to be able to change the wording and images (but retain my CSS layout) over time for certain pages, as new projects get completed and they want to showcase them instead.
They also want a few kind of scratchpad pages where they can almost add anything they like, such as news, etc etc. For them I will just give them some blank pages with some CSS formatting pre-applied for a blank div or something.
I’d like to do all of this in a fairly lightweight fashion - i.e. I really don’t want a username and password field permanently on the site, maybe just an ‘admin’ link that will enable them to log in. When they do log in, ideally I don’t want 10000000000 options to appear as the client may be overwhelmed. I just want an intuitive way for them to edit areas I choose.
So far, I have been looking at Adobe InContext and it definitely fits the bill, but as well as charging a little extra on top to implement, I don’t want to them have to burden the client with further service costs going forward, so rapidly going off the idea! The other contender is CushyCMS, but to be honest I don’t fully trust that it’ll be around forever.
So then I look to the Open source options - and Drupal and Joomla! seem to be the one everyone’s talking about. With such community support and presence, I’m hoping what I’m trying to do is achievable with either?
Because content is stored in MySQL, does that mean I have to store all my content in there, regardless of whether it is to be editable or not? How does this fit in with tightly styled CSS layouts?
Can anyone advise as to whether what I want to achieve is possible at all please? Any advice will be really appreciated!!
I could post the proposed layout to show if that helps.
Many thanks.“
I also posted a couple of links to what my site needs to look like:
“Just to give people an idea, this is how to site needs to look.
I don’t want any extra menus, tabs, or anything else on the site whatsoever hinting that it’s anything other than a static website.
http://www.mnetuk.org/Page_8.pdf...
http://www.mnetuk.org/Page_11.pdf...
And all I want the user to be able to do is change the text and pictures inside the main content div, but not the layout.
This is why I like Adobe InContext. The user just views site normally and then presses a key-combo and it pops up a username / password box, then the areas I’ve marked as editable become just that. When happy they click save and the site returns to a normal looking website.
Is this kind of thing definitely achievable with Drupal?
Thanks.“
Is Concrete5 a viable option for me? I think it is, but need to be sure!
Any help appreciated. Cheers.
I posted the following on the drupal site (http://drupal.org/node/336290) and rather than retyping, if you replace ‘Drupal’ with ‘Concrete5’ it will be applicable!!
“Hi there,
I’ve been looking at the beginner’s guide to Drupal and there’s something I can’t really determine, so hopefully someone here will be able to shed some light.
I’m putting together a site for a client and they require some form of basic CMS. I will put together the site and lay it out as per the design with CSS - and they just want the ability to change aspects of the text and pictures over time. The client is a building firm, so they will have a couple of overview portfolio pages with 6 overviews per page, then 12 more detailed pages linking off those two.
They’ll need to be able to change the wording and images (but retain my CSS layout) over time for certain pages, as new projects get completed and they want to showcase them instead.
They also want a few kind of scratchpad pages where they can almost add anything they like, such as news, etc etc. For them I will just give them some blank pages with some CSS formatting pre-applied for a blank div or something.
I’d like to do all of this in a fairly lightweight fashion - i.e. I really don’t want a username and password field permanently on the site, maybe just an ‘admin’ link that will enable them to log in. When they do log in, ideally I don’t want 10000000000 options to appear as the client may be overwhelmed. I just want an intuitive way for them to edit areas I choose.
So far, I have been looking at Adobe InContext and it definitely fits the bill, but as well as charging a little extra on top to implement, I don’t want to them have to burden the client with further service costs going forward, so rapidly going off the idea! The other contender is CushyCMS, but to be honest I don’t fully trust that it’ll be around forever.
So then I look to the Open source options - and Drupal and Joomla! seem to be the one everyone’s talking about. With such community support and presence, I’m hoping what I’m trying to do is achievable with either?
Because content is stored in MySQL, does that mean I have to store all my content in there, regardless of whether it is to be editable or not? How does this fit in with tightly styled CSS layouts?
Can anyone advise as to whether what I want to achieve is possible at all please? Any advice will be really appreciated!!
I could post the proposed layout to show if that helps.
Many thanks.“
I also posted a couple of links to what my site needs to look like:
“Just to give people an idea, this is how to site needs to look.
I don’t want any extra menus, tabs, or anything else on the site whatsoever hinting that it’s anything other than a static website.
http://www.mnetuk.org/Page_8.pdf...
http://www.mnetuk.org/Page_11.pdf...
And all I want the user to be able to do is change the text and pictures inside the main content div, but not the layout.
This is why I like Adobe InContext. The user just views site normally and then presses a key-combo and it pops up a username / password box, then the areas I’ve marked as editable become just that. When happy they click save and the site returns to a normal looking website.
Is this kind of thing definitely achievable with Drupal?
Thanks.“
Is Concrete5 a viable option for me? I think it is, but need to be sure!
Any help appreciated. Cheers.
Some of what you say is a slam dunk for c5, some not so much.
Yes, c5 will give your client an infinitely simpler end user experience than drupal or joomla would. You don't have to worry about user/pass fields showing up or 100000000000 options they don't want, because concrete5 is very much a building material - not an end product.
The downer is, concrete5 is a building material, not an end product. You will have to spend some real time getting templates built out and putting content in them. I would encourage you maybe reach out on the forums for some freelancer types who might be willing to help you get deeper under the hood. c5 has only been open source for a few months instead of many years in drupal and joomla's case, so you're not going to find as many how-tos and docs out there to help.
play with the demo athttp://concrete5.org/demo and I think you might decide its worth it to learn however.
gluck