Is Concrete5 still alive?
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Hello,
My company was searching for a decent CMS to offer to our customers.
End-Users think in pages not in structured content so we were exclusively searching for CMS with front-end editing capabilities.
I tried Concrete5 and I was really impressed with how easy it is from an end-user perspective.
I hate wordpress and I like the ideas and architecture behind concrete5. From an Engineering perspective, it has the cleanest override solution and it hits a nice balance between wysiwyg page design and structured data.
I want to adopt the platform for our customers' project but for some reason I feel that the project is deserted.
There are no updates on the blog, the forum feels lonely (as if there is no vibrant community) and I feel that there is an overall lack of focus in the roadmap.
Is the project still active? Will it be a good idea to hop on-board and capitalize on Concrete5?
My company was searching for a decent CMS to offer to our customers.
End-Users think in pages not in structured content so we were exclusively searching for CMS with front-end editing capabilities.
I tried Concrete5 and I was really impressed with how easy it is from an end-user perspective.
I hate wordpress and I like the ideas and architecture behind concrete5. From an Engineering perspective, it has the cleanest override solution and it hits a nice balance between wysiwyg page design and structured data.
I want to adopt the platform for our customers' project but for some reason I feel that the project is deserted.
There are no updates on the blog, the forum feels lonely (as if there is no vibrant community) and I feel that there is an overall lack of focus in the roadmap.
Is the project still active? Will it be a good idea to hop on-board and capitalize on Concrete5?
We've been using it since around version 5.5 for new websites whenever we can. It's so much cleaner and easier to develop custom functionality compared to WordPress, and really easy for end-users and non-technical people to edit.
Just launched a pretty high traffic site within the past couple of weeks using version 8 and we've found Concrete5 also scales better than WordPress on the same hosting.
I think the move to 5.7 was a challenge for the project, as there's now a good bit of outdated information and missing documentation on the website, and I'm sure a number of users jumped ship. But the move really was a big improvement as the back-end is now based on the Laravel PHP framework and most of the bugs have been worked out of the new editing interface which is cleaner and more powerful than the old one.
We've worked with a number of CMS's over the years and have never regretted choosing Concrete5 for a project.
Just launched a pretty high traffic site within the past couple of weeks using version 8 and we've found Concrete5 also scales better than WordPress on the same hosting.
I think the move to 5.7 was a challenge for the project, as there's now a good bit of outdated information and missing documentation on the website, and I'm sure a number of users jumped ship. But the move really was a big improvement as the back-end is now based on the Laravel PHP framework and most of the bugs have been worked out of the new editing interface which is cleaner and more powerful than the old one.
We've worked with a number of CMS's over the years and have never regretted choosing Concrete5 for a project.
It can be slow at times in both the forums and general development, but this is due to C5 not being anywhere near as popular as Crappress.
I've been using C5 exclusively since 2009, and am just starting 2 new client projects this week, where I'll be using C5 for both!
If you check out my profile, you'll see that I have some addons and themes (some free) to help get you started!
I've been using C5 exclusively since 2009, and am just starting 2 new client projects this week, where I'll be using C5 for both!
If you check out my profile, you'll see that I have some addons and themes (some free) to help get you started!
Many thanks for your replies.
My analysis has been positive so far.
The code is clean and I like the editing experience.
I will definitely give it a try knowing that you are around if I faced any trouble.
Just a thought, Concrete5 deserves more popularity and community adoption. With Wordpress, developers need extra plugins or lock-in themes to achieve some of what's available out of the box in Concrete5.
I will post again about my experience.
My analysis has been positive so far.
The code is clean and I like the editing experience.
I will definitely give it a try knowing that you are around if I faced any trouble.
Just a thought, Concrete5 deserves more popularity and community adoption. With Wordpress, developers need extra plugins or lock-in themes to achieve some of what's available out of the box in Concrete5.
I will post again about my experience.
Hi devnavybits,
If you are interested in development activity, I recommend starring and watching the concrete5 GitHub project and browsing the different sections. You will find it is very active.
Commits
https://github.com/concrete5/concrete5/commits/develop...
Issues
https://github.com/concrete5/concrete5/issues...
Pull Requests
https://github.com/concrete5/concrete5/pulls...
A note about the PHP framework components used, you can find them listed here:
https://github.com/concrete5/concrete5/blob/develop/concrete/compose...
If you are interested in development activity, I recommend starring and watching the concrete5 GitHub project and browsing the different sections. You will find it is very active.
Commits
https://github.com/concrete5/concrete5/commits/develop...
Issues
https://github.com/concrete5/concrete5/issues...
Pull Requests
https://github.com/concrete5/concrete5/pulls...
A note about the PHP framework components used, you can find them listed here:
https://github.com/concrete5/concrete5/blob/develop/concrete/compose...
Oh yeah, looking at commits and pull requests is a good one too. Looking at that right now, you'll see there's lots of activity :)
Yes we're active.
I switched from WP about 6 months ago for many of the same reasons you mention and haven't regretted my decision one bit. The forum folks are great! They are very friendly and welcoming to newcomers and are very knowledgeable and helpful, I highly recommend C5
I switched from WP about 6 months ago for many of the same reasons you mention and haven't regretted my decision one bit. The forum folks are great! They are very friendly and welcoming to newcomers and are very knowledgeable and helpful, I highly recommend C5
This is a very good question!
The site looks a little old fashioned and outdated. If one looks closer to the pulse on github you see that they are active.
We believe concrete5 deserves way more attention than it gets and we'd love to see more popularity for this really great CMS. This could be done with a fresh design and a better interface for both, - website und software.
bernard
The site looks a little old fashioned and outdated. If one looks closer to the pulse on github you see that they are active.
We believe concrete5 deserves way more attention than it gets and we'd love to see more popularity for this really great CMS. This could be done with a fresh design and a better interface for both, - website und software.
bernard
Speaking for myself: My organization is committed to concrete5. Between two major efforts we expect to field more than 100 -- closer to 150 -- C5-based sites.
TL:DR> Yes. Version 8 is sweet, check out Express - we don't post to the blog every day and redesign our site annually because we're a bunch of engineers.
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Yup. We're here and busy.
http://www.concrete5.org/developers/developer-downloads/...
8.2 should come out soon.
Slack is quite active.http://concrete5.org/slack
It's been a couple years since we redesigned this site, it's not a huge priority at the moment to be honest. Certainly lots of corners that need attention, but it feels clean and is mostly responsive. Higher on our list is decentralizing parts of this site. So in the last year or two we've pulled the docs out into their own version of concrete5 that behaves like a wiki, we've taken the top level pages and turned them into a version 7 install for marketing focused stuff. The marketplace, profiles, and forums remain in a older legacy concrete5 install that we'd love to redo at some point. It's quite possible we'll look at different forum solutions, though cooking up our own on top of Conversations in v8 is a possibility... etc.
If people would like to help with marketing - we'd love to have your case studies, documentation, guest blog posts, answering posts here or in slack, etc. There's so many ways we could all be putting a little effort sharing how concrete5 has worked for us, in our own voices and our own platforms.
----
Yup. We're here and busy.
http://www.concrete5.org/developers/developer-downloads/...
8.2 should come out soon.
Slack is quite active.http://concrete5.org/slack
It's been a couple years since we redesigned this site, it's not a huge priority at the moment to be honest. Certainly lots of corners that need attention, but it feels clean and is mostly responsive. Higher on our list is decentralizing parts of this site. So in the last year or two we've pulled the docs out into their own version of concrete5 that behaves like a wiki, we've taken the top level pages and turned them into a version 7 install for marketing focused stuff. The marketplace, profiles, and forums remain in a older legacy concrete5 install that we'd love to redo at some point. It's quite possible we'll look at different forum solutions, though cooking up our own on top of Conversations in v8 is a possibility... etc.
If people would like to help with marketing - we'd love to have your case studies, documentation, guest blog posts, answering posts here or in slack, etc. There's so many ways we could all be putting a little effort sharing how concrete5 has worked for us, in our own voices and our own platforms.
Many thanks.
With all your replies, it's clear that the project is still alive.
However, I found it disturbing that this is not clear to first time users / visitors.
I was exploring it for the last couple of days and so far I like it! We have a buried gem here and it deserves higher developer interest.
With all your replies, it's clear that the project is still alive.
However, I found it disturbing that this is not clear to first time users / visitors.
I was exploring it for the last couple of days and so far I like it! We have a buried gem here and it deserves higher developer interest.
Have been developing with concrete5 since version 5.6.x, back in the beginning of 2013 I guess. Ever since it's been growing and growing. With version 8.x, they have a very stable and good codebase, which is up-to-date (using composer and stuff like that). Compare that to the outdated code WordPress uses with plain PHP functions everywhere even for plugins/themes and no composer (I'm not even beginning on security/updates here).
Anyways, the forum is quite active and so is Slack (https://www.concrete5.org/slack). It's not deserted at all. The U.S. Army also uses/will be using concrete5 - read here:https://www.concrete5.org/about/blog/news/concrete5-picked-for-u-s-a...
The blog may be a bit lonely every now and then, sometimes there are a few posts a week, sometimes none for a few weeks.
Concrete5 is a great CMS for inline (live) editing and I have been looking for others every few months but haven't found any other decent one yet myself. I am always on the lookout, trying to see what others do (good and bad). If you ask me, there is no CMS out there yet that does things as concrete5 does.
My advice, give it a shot, watch some tutorials/youtube videos and ask around in the forums or on Slack. You'll find out that you will be helped by others 99 out of 100 times.