What are the differences in the three packages? Can someone knowlegable with all three please create a table chart for comparison? Thanks!

Hi all,

I am an unskilled private web-builder (that is .. I built some small personal sites, using Drupal).
Concrete5 impressed me with their claims about easiness, and usability, so I installed a Concrete site for a small personal environment.
I returned to Drupal after three days of trying, however.

Perhaps it's a pity that I didn't perform a thorough comparison, it would have helped here.

On general Concrete5 claims how easy it is to set up a site and maintain it. They complain about the Drupal terminoly, but Concrete has their own terminology instead.
Yes, it's easy for an end-user to edit pages, or create new pages .. but doesn't Drupal give the same functionality?
When I looked a bit further, there were not much differences in granting people rights, for example.
And when I wanted to add other functionality, I quickly found out there isn't much .. it's not an active community like Drupal.
And in case one needs a useful add-on, like a Blog add-on for example --which is core within Drupal anyway-- then you will have to pay. There are too much dollars in Concrete5, and my idea is that that attitude only will spread. So I withdrew.
I had a hard time to find relevant documentation (if there were any), which was a nuisance.

Well, in general, I can understand that developers want to see some revenues for their job. But with concrete5 they are stretching the idea a bit.. Better build a community to rely upon first, I would say.

On the whole it seems Concrete is excellent at window dressing. Perhaps Drupal should learn from that. :)
It's Drupal with me ^^, although I don't consider myself a die-hard.

Obviously, since you're on c5.org eppie, you're going to find a lot of people here who will disagree with you...me being one of them :)

I don't have but about 30 minutes experience with Drupal, so I can't do a feature-to-feature comparison, but I wanted to respond to a few of the things you mentioned.

Terminology - I believe the claim here is more around the idea of C5's terminology making more sense. Drupal has terms like node, taxonomy, and vocabulary. Those make much less sense to me that terms's like page, block, and area used by C5.

Creating Pages - In my experience with Drupal, I remember it not being clear at all how to add a page. It seemed like you add an article or blog post or something, but that wasn't what I wanted to do. I wanted to create a new page. Unlike many popular CMS's, C5 embraces the concept of a page and the process of creating/editing is much more intuitive.

Community - C5 community is not active? Hang out for a little while and I think you'll notice that the opposite is true. Yes, it's probably smaller and thus somewhat less active than older projects like Drupal and Joomla, but that is because C5 is still relatively new (released under MIT around 2 years ago).

Paying for Add-ons - No commment. Everybody has their opinion on this and talking about is opening up a can of worms. I will just say that I'm happy to pay a small fee for an add-on if it's good and works properly.

Documentation - Yes, this area had been lagging for a while, but there is a totally revamped doc's section that is a huge improvement over what used to exist.

This might provide some more useful insight as well:
http://www.concrete5.org/community/forums/chat/concrete5_vs_drupal/...

"Well, in general, I can understand that developers want to see some revenues for their job. But with concrete5 they are stretching the idea a bit.. Better build a community to rely upon first, I would say."

OUCH! Sorry eppie that bites me and many others too!

Let's ask you. Do you work for free? Do you help others for free and do their work for free too?

I you can't say: yes,yes,yes You hit yourself with that argument.

If you're talking about something like a developer who is selfless, free and talented, yeah there are some, really! But they have to earn money to live, too. So they won't release endless free themes & addons, but they will release some. And the more people are here the higher is the chance that there are more free addons.

But yea, you may have been spoiled with the amount of [buggy] addons from joomla and drupal maybe.

But they have a longer life span than C5!! Please keep that in mind. People alway want it yesterday, give it a change dude it's just a year or two old.

Another more neglected topic is: "What costs is good." You've to admit that the oppisite isn't true, but this is true.

Means that free software can be good, but software that costs can be better. That's logical, right?

And I'm going to release free addons/themes when I come to breathe and time too...

have a nice weekend

Well, eppie, it's a shame you didn't spend some extra time using C5, you are missing out on the fun man, it's easy to use, easy to theme and easy to extend, as simple as that.

Here is a link to the really cool Developers Guide in case you want to go for round 2.

http://www.concrete5.org/documentation/......

Cheers.

Hope this helps you:

http://www.concrete5.org/community/forums/chat/c5_vs_joomla/...

I've made a comparison, scroll to the bottom, the last post, I've attached a pdf there.