concrete5 – first impressions
I downloaded the concrete5 CMS a couple of weeks ago and intended to write a critique earlier, but am only now getting around to doing so. Since then, this article was released on CMS Wire and Joomla! fans on Twitter began talking.
What’s good
One common pitfall of CMSes is to abstract away the concept of a page. concrete5 avoids this and very much embraces pages. A+ in my book. While it’s true that some layer of abstraction can be helpful in certain cases (usually when you’re building an application inside of your CMS), it adds extra work for most webmasters.
Editing pages is also very straightforward. Once you’re in edit mode, all of the blocks (similar to Joomla! modules) appear with dotted borders. Clicking on one gives you several options for editing the block, including dragging and dropping the block to a new position. Very nicely done.
The features built around content5 are thoughtful. Versioning is built in and outputs diff-style coloring when comparing revisions. There are also extensions to help you embed videos, Google Maps, slide shows, and RSS feeds.
About 70% of the functionality you’ll need on a regular basis is contained in the toolbar that appears as you’re editing individual pages. For the rest, there’s a specific “dashboard” backend where you can go to manage themes and files, get reports, and perform other administrative tasks.
Theming is okay
The theming system is reasonable. Like Joomla!, you can add specific themes to specific pages. Closer to Drupal, your theme can define several different page types, which might eliminate the need for separate themes. However, concrete5 requires theme designers to instantiate objects within their markup, then call member functions of those objects to display output. This bothers me. It seems like static function calls or embedded tokens would handle this more elegantly.
Also, the greensalad example theme uses the “header.php at the top, footer.php at the bottom” style of breaking up the markup—I loathe this. There’s no reason to use this error-prone method for theming: you end up with tags that are opened in one file and closed in another.
What’s annoying
While the simplicity of editing individual pages is definitely something I prefer, concrete5 has sacrificed some features to get there. I was not able to find any kind of feature to create a blog-style index of content made up of blurbs from other pages. Add-ons are scarce: if you’re looking for a forum or shopping cart, you might be in for a wait until they attract more developers to the platform.
I ran into a few speed bumps when installing concrete5 locally. After downloading it and going to the installation screen, there was a checklist of PHP configuration settings necessary to run concrete5 (not unlike Joomla!’s). Most of them were good to go after tweaking folder permissions, but I did not have the GD library setup on my self-compiled version of PHP. I was a little surprised that the system would not let me continue installation. While I’m sure there are features in concrete5 that use server-side image processing, this doesn’t strike me as something so vital as to halt installation. (I was able to successfully install both GD and concrete5 on my spare Ubuntu machine.)
Although the GD dependency was annoying, the halted installation uncovers something even more so. If the installer detects even the slightest issue with your configuration, an advertisement for professional installation is displayed. Quite tacky; they could have at least provided a link to their installation forum.
Which brings us to community. This company oozes a know-it-all attitude. In sharp contrast to the websites of other CMSes, their official About page openly bashes Joomla!, Drupal, and WordPress; painting all three in rather broad strokes. This is very disappointing, unnecessary, and ultimately counter-productive. I’m all for making bold statements, but they’re driving away the very people who could help their platform grow quickly.
Final word
concrete5 is a very promising CMS that does the basics very well. The interface is picked up quickly and things are easy to find. However, if they’re earnest about building a community around their code, they might want to tone down the self-worship a smidge. And is content management really a human right?
9 Responses to “concrete5 – first impressions”
Hi,
Thanks so much for the honest review! I think you might look into the Page List block to get the summary list of content from other pages you’re looking for.
You’re right about our marketplace being smaller than Drupal or Joomla’s. This is obviously because we are quite new in comparison. Although to be frank – in the big picture we look at a marketplace that offers over 300 competing add-ons for something as basic as permissions to be less than helpful. We’re going to do everything we can to keep our marketplace a safe and sane place where you don’t have to be an advanced developer to augment your website.
Regarding our attitude. Ya know, there are literally thousands of content management systems out there. If we aren’t willing to say we’re better than the rest, who is gonna? We’re not making any claims that are untrue. We recognize that we have just a few seconds of potential attention from someone choosing a CMS. It is really important we help them understand what makes concrete5 unique. If you read through the rest of our about section you’ll see we’re just as frank about things that we DON’T think concrete5 is a great fit for, and in fact, we proudly use WordPress for our own Studio blog.
The reality is, out of the thousands of CMS’s out there only a handful deliver in-context editing. Of that handful, even fewer are open source and free, and of them, none are delivering the enterprise level features like advanced permissions and versioning that we do. We have nothing but respect for the people who have contributed their time and efforts to other projects. Certainly nothing we’ve ever said has been derogitory about the passion and people behind these. That being said, I (and thousands of others) believe we have a better approach. Surely open source doesn’t mean “don’t compete”..
Whatcha gonna do?
Thanks for the comment! I’ll have to take a look at the Page List block when I get a chance.
Let me address where I still think you’re totally unnecessarily turning off potential developers and users of your platform:
“We recognize that we have just a few seconds of potential attention from someone choosing a CMS. It is really important we help them understand what makes concrete5 unique.”
And this is precisely my point: why are you wasting four paragraphs on your About page making vague criticisms about other content management systems? concrete5 has plenty to talk about without dragging in everyone else. You could be recruiting smart developers who understand the limitations of their current CMS of choice. But instead of talking about the benefits of the way you do inline editing, theming, and extensions; you’re annoyingly rehashing arguments we’ve all heard before.
We don’t have a page on the Joomla! site talking about why you should use it instead of Drupal. Likewise, Drupal doesn’t have a page comparing themselves to WordPress. Same goes for commercial CMSes like ExpressionEngine. There are already plenty of places where I can go to get banter about Joomla!, Drupal, and WordPress (including some local watering holes). When I go to your website, I want to hear about YOU.
Thank you Joe for this useful review about Concrete5! Both following comments are very interesting too!
I am the webmaster of a full website in HTML and have been looking since last year for an ‘accessible’ CMS. I recently discovered Concrete5. I am far from being a newbie in computers but I have no such time today to (re)study coding. I consider that general softwares and CMS in particular should be written for end users, the ones uploading content not (only) for developers.
I mean if we buy a car and want to tune it because we’re a mechanic expert/fan, that’s alright but cars can be run by anyone who has a permit and a minimum of experience.
Concerning CMS, like Drupal for example, I know that fantastic projects can be realized but when one already need to understand their vocabulary, you definitely understand what kind of user is targeted. I am sorry but terms like “node” and “taxonomy” are not the best choice except if some guys want to play it smart. At least Joomla simply call it “page” and “category” and I found it much easier to get a first result/page. Still a lot of time is needed/wasted to create categories, sections, etc…
WordPress is unquestionably the most accessible/popular but although a majority considers it today as a CMS, you can really feel that it was designed as a blogging tool. Excellent, friendly, easy with lots of help and thousands of themes…but mainly a blogging tool.
So in my desperate research I once typed in Google “easier than Drupal more sophisticated than WordPress” and surprise, I had on the first line result an article about Concrete5 published in ‘Bloggersbase’ (in fact a copy from an article written by Leyl Black from Concrete5).
Of course I immediately thought that I should investigate on it.
So yes you’re right, there’s no need to pointlessly push down competitors but write a few lines to position the product, why not?
At least they got me as a new user because they talked of the 2 other giants
By the way here is what is written in the “About” section of Concrete5: “Drupal and Joomla were designed by and for developers. Building and maintaining a site in Drupal or Joomla is far too complex and intimidating for a regular person…” Well honestly, I didn’t find these lines insulting but informative (and true) with a meaning of “If you want simpler, do try us” and that worked for me as I quickly downloaded Concrete5 and immediately had a try.
Finally concerning the “know-it-all attitude”, well this is not new in the web-tech kind of environment and forums, probably also related to the young age of guys there.
I remember posting quite often on Drupal and Joomla forums, not only for questions but also to give (right) answers to others. I never had a single word of recognition or anything like that except from newbies who were happy to have their problem solved. I mean you really feel that you’re a stranger amongst a community of developers and if you’re not asking about modifying a hundred lines in the core module, you probably won’t have a (serious) answer.
Considering a bit “regular” users as well as their ideas and needs is often optional. This might explain the tremendous success of WordPress, knowing that their users are mainly “regular”.
Nowadays whatever general product we’re talking about, it is clear that success goes with access and I feel this is clearly the goal of Concrete5. I am still trying the product with others to see which one really suits me best but what is for sure is that accessibility is for me a priority. I don’t think I am the only one over here and Concrete5 has strong advantages compared to others. Hope Concrete5 will remain in the years to come simple and easy as it is today and keep its originality, not to become just “another CMS”
Thanks for the comment. I guess we’re at a place where we’re talking about
antidotalanecdotal evidence versusantidotalanecdotal evidence. I’ve met many “regular” users who are quite comfortable setting up a Joomla website. Obviously there are many others who don’t like it and have fled for greener pastures.To say that Joomla! was designed “designed by and for developers” is quite incorrect. The project Joomla! originated from (Mambo) was designed for use by small organizations and business owners. Great pains have been taken so that you can set up an entire website without touching a line of PHP or HTML. This has been done to the point that you can go and install extensions through the admin interface without so much as firing up an FTP client.
As far a threads on the Joomla! forum go, thank you for answering questions! I have to admit that I haven’t spent time on there in a while, but every bit truly does help. It has grown quite substantially to over a quarter of a million users and 1.6 million threads. Statistically, the core developers are not going to see “how do I put this on the front page” question that’s already been answered three dozen times (although I have seen them patiently answer such questions). If you want to get to know some of the moderators and developers, I’ve found the Lounge to be a good place to talk.
In any event, I still think concrete5 has strong enough offerings that they don’t need to waste any time talking about the shortcomings of systems. While they may be young (as many would consider myself to be), this really isn’t an excuse for such a hubristic website.
It still seems someone missed the point. Like HelloNingbo I found Concrete5 by googling for “cms easier than joomla and drupal” – google result position: One!
Although it might sound offending for someone – it’s not but just informative. They pick up their customers where the are – searching for a better,lighter solution than the bloated Joomla and Drupal.
Hi Mark, thanks for the comment.
The issue is not that I’m offended that they picked on my CMS of choice (I’m not), but that they are insisting on defining themselves as “not Drupal, Joomla, or WordPress.” Will this get you some traffic? Sure. But will it work as a long term strategy for attracting more developers to their platform? I don’t think so. And don’t try to tell me they aren’t trying to attract developers.
I think there’s plenty of room and plenty yet to be done in the CMS market. Unfortunately, concrete5 is spending a great deal of energy explaining what they aren’t instead of explaining what they are. They’re like the politicians that campaign on “not being the other guy.” Once the guy gets into office, people start seeing the character flaws and complaining just as loudly as before.
I was excited about this software until I saw their marketing and tried to install it. There’s a very perceptible vibe of “we’re the experts, you’re the users” from the very get-go. Not a good one to send out if you’re trying to build a community around your product. And seeing as this blog post is PageRank 4 on Google for ‘concrete5′ eight months later, they obviously haven’t built that community.
Hi Joe !
I’m Jamy from HelloNingbo and I’m happy to see that we have new comments here
My experience about Concrete5 unfortunately stopped last year during summer time as I had too many options I could not deal with.
So I waited for Joomla 1.6, supposed to have a brand new category and pages system but until now nothing came…
Drupal is for sure a reference but I am not the one that can handle it. Too little time and coding knowledge. In between I also tested quite a few names like Modx,Vivvo, etc but could not really find what I was expecting.
So I came back to WordPress as they had since last autumn quite a few releases and spent a lot of times reading articles with tips while trying tons of plugins on my local site.
I must say WordPress has really progressed in the past 2 years but still remained very easy to manage.
And finally I uploaded the first pages of my new website about 2 weeks ago and I am quite pleased with WordPress. I think the guys overthere did a huge job although we always want more…
Coming back to Concrete5 needs to see what the developments will be and you are right Joe to point out that the community work is essential. It’s incredible the number of plugins and themes we can find with WordPress and this makes a huge difference as anyone can tune his WP site according to his need.
A few months ago I read an interview from Dries Buytaert saying that his goal for the years to come was to make Drupal easier and easier on the back end side in order to be accessible by all.
So I guess we are going on the right direction and in a few years we will even have more choice…Isn’t life beautiful?
Cheers!
Jamy
@Joe LeBlanc:
I can follow your thoughts but I still cannot see why just that few sentences, saying we are better than x,y,z should distract developers to become part of the c5 community. When you think about objects in the world you always compare them with similar objects, so it goes with CMS. And I’m pretty sure if you ask a developer of a CMS system what makes his cms better than the others he will frankly give you a lot of answers because he KNOWS what his cms and especially what the other cms are made of.
So why exactly is it daunting when one compares his work with others? (what everybody does, even more if someone searches for alternatives. Whether it’s true is another story but to classify your product in a broad offer like the cms market is seems to be more than comprehensable.
@Jamy: Would love to hear some details about your breakdown with concrete5. What was it you could not accomplish? From my point of view concrete5 has not such a big community because it’s coded OOP in PHP5, means classes and mvc style that most php developers are not comfortable with. Am I wrong?