Questions before "Taking the Plunge" with Concrete
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Hi all!
I am currently in the process of choosing a new open-source CMS upon which to base my upcoming projects. The CMS I currently use is one I built for myself from scratch. I love it (it’s powerful, lightweight, and tuned for performance), but it doesn’t have the “maturity” of some of the larger CMS’s out there. Of all the open-source CMS’s I’ve looked at so far, Concrete seems the most appealing (you have a very slick and intuitive user-interface, which is very good for end-users), but before I “take the plunge,” I still have some questions that need to be answered.
1. Is there currently a way to: A) move all JS to the bottom of the page, just before the closing </body> tag, B) output the CSS and JS inline and/or combine them instead of using external links, and C) optionally minimize them on-the-fly?
Many of these are recommended by Steve Souders and the YSlow team for front-end performance reasons.
Out of the box, it looks like Concrete is slapping a lot of JS up in the <head> tag and then throughout the HTML based on what different blocks need. How disruptive would it be to incorporate this functionality into Concrete?
2. I usually build my layouts with pixel-precision. I’m concerned about the 2px dotted borders added to blocks when in edit mode, thinking they might push the float-based columns around where they’re not supposed to go. How do you typically account for this?
3. How do you separate out areas of the website into different sections?
For example, say your client’s company has ten different departments and each one wants its own separate section to the website. There may be apps shared between them (for instance a calendar or news feed) but each section needs its own data within the app (so the “Parts” department has a calendar with its own events and the “Services” department has its own calendar, but both are actually using the same backend app code). How do you typically handle this?
5. How big is your developer community?
Are we talking 10 people? 100 people? 1,000 people? 10,000 or more?
Size doesn’t matter to me, but it might to my potential clients.
6. How much do you take into account handicapped accessibility issues with the various add-ons and modules?
7. You’re using ADODB. Have you actually tested this CMS with DB’s other than MySQL? Which ones?
8. Have your developers been able to get Concrete to work on IIS, perhaps using the ISAPI ReWrite Plugin? A bunch of my clients are using IIS and are unwilling to migrate to Apache.
9. Are there demos of the add-ons in the marketplace?
Or do we have to fork over the cash in order to see if they will work for us?
Thanks for your replies!
I am currently in the process of choosing a new open-source CMS upon which to base my upcoming projects. The CMS I currently use is one I built for myself from scratch. I love it (it’s powerful, lightweight, and tuned for performance), but it doesn’t have the “maturity” of some of the larger CMS’s out there. Of all the open-source CMS’s I’ve looked at so far, Concrete seems the most appealing (you have a very slick and intuitive user-interface, which is very good for end-users), but before I “take the plunge,” I still have some questions that need to be answered.
1. Is there currently a way to: A) move all JS to the bottom of the page, just before the closing </body> tag, B) output the CSS and JS inline and/or combine them instead of using external links, and C) optionally minimize them on-the-fly?
Many of these are recommended by Steve Souders and the YSlow team for front-end performance reasons.
Out of the box, it looks like Concrete is slapping a lot of JS up in the <head> tag and then throughout the HTML based on what different blocks need. How disruptive would it be to incorporate this functionality into Concrete?
2. I usually build my layouts with pixel-precision. I’m concerned about the 2px dotted borders added to blocks when in edit mode, thinking they might push the float-based columns around where they’re not supposed to go. How do you typically account for this?
3. How do you separate out areas of the website into different sections?
For example, say your client’s company has ten different departments and each one wants its own separate section to the website. There may be apps shared between them (for instance a calendar or news feed) but each section needs its own data within the app (so the “Parts” department has a calendar with its own events and the “Services” department has its own calendar, but both are actually using the same backend app code). How do you typically handle this?
5. How big is your developer community?
Are we talking 10 people? 100 people? 1,000 people? 10,000 or more?
Size doesn’t matter to me, but it might to my potential clients.
6. How much do you take into account handicapped accessibility issues with the various add-ons and modules?
7. You’re using ADODB. Have you actually tested this CMS with DB’s other than MySQL? Which ones?
8. Have your developers been able to get Concrete to work on IIS, perhaps using the ISAPI ReWrite Plugin? A bunch of my clients are using IIS and are unwilling to migrate to Apache.
9. Are there demos of the add-ons in the marketplace?
Or do we have to fork over the cash in order to see if they will work for us?
Thanks for your replies!
