Concrete The Studio

by Franz

This thing on??    * tap-tap *

Wow, it’s been an embarrassingly long time since anyone looked at this wordpress blog. First, lets pass out blame for that:

• Time – once you have children it stops being endless.
• Twitter – who knows what that thing is gonna become, but it does kinda take a big slice of motivation out of anyone posting to a blog. While crafting the perfect 140 characters isn’t “easy,” it does always seem like the shortest path when you have something new to announce. I’m not arguing that’s right, there’s certainly a lot of crap content with no real voice there – but still. I think every one’s kinda knee jerking over there for news announcements these days.
• Do concrete5 and WP compete? Sure kinda. I guess we say we do on our about page, so *shrugs*. We’ve talked about this here in the past. My view is concrete5 is a flexible CMS (legos), while Wordpress is a really nice Blog (Barbie). Both have value. We never tried to recreate the blog editing experience with concrete5 – but along came some 3rd party developers to do just that. Now there’s kinda an unspoken question of why our blog isn’t in concrete5 and frankly the answer is just Time, again.
• Me. The buck stops here..

So what’s happened since MAY of last year??! Ugh.. well.. a lot!

• Launched the marketplace, had it grow dramatically, fueled by the work of 3rd party developers as much as us.
• Rebuilt the way we do hosting and started developing a true server management application for running multiple concete5 installs on a box.
• Launched a few versions of concrete5 that changed around all sorts of stuff nicely.
• Launched eCommerce add-on, Launched Discussion Forums
• Built a concrete5 cyborg that is laying waste to the American west.

Okay so that last one was a lie, but what’s going on right now?

• We’re just about halfway towards our fund-raising goal for going to SXSW! Thanks to all our donors.
• We were just given a few pages in The New Rules of Marketing & PR by David Meerman Scott. I guess transparency and community are the new big things in marketing, and happily – we’re good at ‘em already!  It’s certainly worth picking this up if you’re trying to bring your company into the 21st century – he does a great job covering everything in detail.

What’s next?

Meh. I’m all tuckered, this is waaay more than 140 characters.. you’ll just have to stay tuned to find out.

by Franz

Okay, we’ve been through this enough times that it deserves a clear position from the CEO….

concrete5 core is free and open source. When we say free, we mean “free beer.” Our belief is that content management is a human right, and we are committed to making it easy for everyone in the world to run a website.

However, not every add-on in our marketplace is free. All of them are open source – meaning once you buy it you are “free” to do what you want to it for that site, and you can get “under the hood” completely. Read the rest of this entry »

by Franz

concrete5.3 has been made possible by long hours, a great community of developers, and the kind license grants of these folks:

Aaron Swartz

This developer wrote the Python based engine we use to compare versions. It’s the only script we’ve been able to find that actually does diff with an awareness of how HTML tags work. If you stop and think about it, you’ll realize that’s a HUGE challenge and this guy solved it with a few pages of code. You should hire him to think about very complicated problems if he’s willing. He allowed us to bundle his GPL based script into concrete5 under the LGPL licesne.

http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/diff/

Jordan Michael

This designer does a lot of amazing work, is based in Chicago, and is gonna be someone you read about in magazines and books one day (if he isn’t already!) We’re using his file type icons in the new file manager because they’re dead sexy, and work at a large scale. He’s allowed us rights to redistribute them with concrete5 and we really dig that!

www.Jordan-Michael.com

Thanks to both of these guys, it’s awesome to be able to find something amazing on the web and use it. We’ll keep doing our best to make sure the whole package is greater than the sum of it’s parts!

by Franz

So my lawyer called me up the other day with interesting news.. “Your trademark application for concrete5(tm) is going well, you’re gonna be able to turn that TM into a little R with a circle any day, just get that c5 crap off of your website.”
Read the rest of this entry »

by Andrew Embler

Yesterday, I was lamenting the fact that searching concrete5.org (specifically, finding the search input field on the website) wasn’t as easy as I thought it ought to be.

Todd, one of our excellent developers, came up with a great solution for those who use Firefox: a custom Firefox search plugin. His original used google.com to search concrete5.org, and while I can appreciate that, I’m hoping that our search has improved to the point where that’s not necessary. With that in mind, I’ve tweaked it so that it searches concrete5.org directly.

Download the concrete5 Firefox Search Plugin

Installing the search plugin:

The following instructions assume that your copy of Firefox is in a standard location.

First, download concrete5.xml above, and then…

On Windows: Copy it to “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins”

On OS X: Copy it to “/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/searchplugins”

Restart Firefox and concrete5 should appear in the search engine list, below the search field, complete with a nice icon. Thanks again, Todd. You may have even given me a reason to occasionally ditch Safari.

by Andrew Embler

Thanks to the Usagi Project for putting this video together.

The full HD version can be found here.

by Franz

Some very cool people in Japan have taken the lead with concrete5 there and will be demoing it at on Open Source conference this month. If you happen to be in Japan, or have a lot of disposable income and are looking for an excuse to jump on a plane and head there on short notice…. here ya go!

Usagi Project will attend Tokyo OSC with concrete5 Japanese version.

Tokyo Open Source Conference 2009/Spring
Japan Electronics College Building No.7
1-25-4 Hyakunin-cho
Shinjuky, Tokyo, 169-8522
Japan

東京オープンソースコンファレンス2009/Spring
日本電子専門学校 7号館
東京都新宿区百人町1-25-4

RSVP the seminar at
http://www.ospn.jp/osc2009-spring/modules/eguide/event.php?eid=76

Also you can just show up at our demo booth during the event.
———-
Feb 20 (Fri) 10:00am -5:30pm
Feb 21 (Sat) 10:00am -4:30pm

Date & time for first meeting
Feb 20 (Fri) – 21 (Sat) (Seminar starts on Feb 21 11am)

by Franz

5.2 has been officially released, no more “release candidate.”

We’ve landed two large projects that will improve concrete5 in dramatic ways. First, we’re helping a very excellent creative agency build a big site for a major organization, and it involves a complete overhaul of the file system and asset manager. This is wonderful stuff. This means no more single directory with timestamp prefixes on files, but rather a well thought out system with versions, permissions, meta data – all sorts of nice stuff.

Second, we’re building a major ecommerce implementation for a fun children’s book publisher that integrates concrete5 with Magento Commerce.  Both are very powerful applications for what they do, and should behave well as one product in the future.

We’re also releasing some more add-ons to the marketplace, starting with the ad block today and with the calendar block right around the corner. The forums are going to be heading out to our beta team & user groups shortly – progress is being made on all fronts.

All of this means we’re quite busy, bringing on more help, and generally loving where we are with concrete5! We have to scale back our already limited involvement in the day-to-day postings of the forum. Andrew and I are going to try to get through all un-answered threads once a week if we can, but you’re going to have to continue to rely on the community experts that have already started to answer most stuff in there. If you would like an “official” view on something in a timely fashion, I would strongly encourage you to evaluate the worth of concrete5 to your business and join our Partnership Programs, where we promise your issue attention within 48 hours, typically 8.

So I hope you’re all having a great start of ’09 so far – it’s clearly going to be a very exciting year.

by Franz

When I saw the Title dropdown on the registration form, I should have known things would go poorly. Instead of just your regular old Mr., Mrs., Ms., there were dozens of options.. Esquire.. Captain, Admiral, Sir, Duke – and the oh so too tempting “Lord.” I appreciate the creativity of a bored production programmer, so I couldn’t pass up the opportunity of bringing a touch of royalty to my business trip. Wow, was I mistaken.
Read the rest of this entry »

by Andrew Embler

To anyone in Portland who’s interested: I’ll be doing a demo of concrete5 and a Q&A targeted at developers at pdxphp tonight. It’s at 6:30, at cubespace. 

For more information:

http://pdxphp.org/meetings/2009/january

by Franz

Wow, what a year.

A year ago, we had no idea we were going open source. By summer we were releasing early versions of our re-hauled CMS. By the fall we were getting over a thousand visitors to concrete5.org a day. We were featured as Project of the Month on SourceForge and we’ve been the subject of dozens of positive blogs and interviews. Sites powered with c5 are springing up all across the web, and we couldn’t be happier.

With v5.1 we saw concrete5 go multilingual, and now we have translations for Danish, German and French available (we’d like more!) Folks are using our (previously) secret sauce, and we’re hearing so much positive feedback. With v5.2 (being released as I type) we’ve started adding lots of features for end site owners to love. For a complete internet n00b, it is still far easier to get started with Wordpress than it is c5 – we’re trying to change that.

The concrete5.org website was just got a complete re-hauling. We took it down for 24 hours and turned it back on with a new Marketplace, improved search and Forums, rearranged help… really too much to even mention in this post, read about it over here.

We have a several Add-Ons that will be made available for sale on the Marketplace in the coming weeks, and we’re even more eager for the c5network of developers to submit their own.

2008 has been a crazy adventure, I’m confident 2009 will be even more so – and that’s because of You. Thanks for your continued love and dedication to c5, it’s exciting to get out of bed every day and see what’s happened. Let’s take over the web!

-frz

by Franz

Our hosting clients have long received preferential treatment from us. Pay me something, anything, to worry about your website every month and I’m obviously going to put a star next to your email in my in-box, whatever the subject might be.

The explosive growth of c5 this year has created a lot of new challenges for us as we look at prioritizing our already limited time. We want nothing more than to be worried about the core, promotion, and best practices around c5 – making it the most popular CMS on the planet. For that to happen, we all (c5 staff and community alike) need to consider the best ways to focus our time to help the project scale. We see several groups emerging in our young community already, and we’re going to provide tools to help foster their growth.

c5network – The c5network members are simply anyone who has joined concrete5.org, or any of the local user group sites. We will connect this network of sites through openID, and by joining one you will be able to contribute and benefit from them all. Attend any meeting in the world you’d like to, get promotional discounts, early notice on exciting updates, everything you’d expect and more – for nothing.

c5services – Freelancers and webshops that are providing development services to customers using c5 are encouraged to join this affordable Partnership Program. Amongst many other benefits, a private forum ensures a timely response on any post from c5 staff.

c5hosting – Companies that host websites built with concrete5 are encouraged to join our affordable c5hosting Partner Program. Membership includes Whitepapers on how to centralize the c5 code base for a shared server, and how to setup the auto-generating demos we offer at getConcrete5.com/demo. Many other benefits are included as well as private forums with a guaranteed response by c5 staff.

Please don’t take the existence of the c5services and c5hosting Partner Programs as any sign that we’re less open source, free, or ‘good’ than we were yesterday. We could have chosen a shareware or crippleware approach with c5, but we didn’t and never will. We’re not requiring you join any Partner Program to sell your goods in the new Marketplace, and we remain firmly dedicated to making the world a better place. Quite simply; we have to provide the same option for preferred support to the whole community, as we do to our hosting clients on getConcrete5.com.

More to the point, these are not private one to one retainers where big pocketbooks tie the core team up on the phone all day doing their work for them. These are more akin to Unions where you have the freedom and solidarity that comes from being surrounded by a group of your actual peers, in private. The real benefit here is instead of just getting access to us, members of these Partner Programs can openly share with one another as well.

-frz,

by Franz

Well you may have noticed our concrete5.org site was being “renovated” for the last 24 hours. With the amount of community activity we’ve been having, we just couldn’t find a reasonable way to stage and launch our updates any more gracefully, so thanks for bearing with us through this interruption in services. We’ll do everything we can to avoid it in the future.
Here’s just some of what changed:

• We completely revamped the home page and several landing pages to give the site a more friendly experience to the non-programmers out there. We also changed the footer around to be a bit more useful and friendly for everyone.
• A Marketplace now exists! You can browse Themes and Add-Ons, fill a shopping cart with them, make a real purchase with a credit card and instantly download the files.
• If you are a developer or designer selling something in the Marketplace, you now get credits in your account which you can choose to have paid out via paypal, or you can use to make other purchases around the site. You also get your own forums and ticketing system so you can provide ongoing support to your customers.
• Forums & Tickets got a bunch of small UI tweaks to make life easier. We now can easily set status of feature requests and bugs without going into edit mode. You can now drag and drop the posting window around your browser so you can see what you’re replying to as you write (that one used to drive me up the wall.)
• We added member search, buffed out the profile, and introduced 23 new member “badges” that represent expertise and interest. Now you’ll be able to see if that person giving you advice actually knows what they’re talking about.
• We added a local user group map and search. If you want to have a physical monthly meeting of c5 folk in your area, we want to hear from you and link to you on our map.
• We put alot of work into making search more useful (i.e.: not suck so much). It’s still got some ways to go, but it is way better than what we had.
• We seeded the marketplace with a bunch of free blocks we’ve made after listening to real world requests.
• Rearranged help and added some new screen-casts and articles.
• We added c5hosting and c5services Partner Program areas.

uhh… I’m sure lots of little things I’m completely spacing because it’s all a blur at this point. Any rate, let us know if anything is off. Thanks for bearing with us while we rolled all that out.

-frz

by Franz

So, for a long while we just had a single shared c5 demo setup that would clean itself out every hour on the hour. Crude, but an easy way to get a demo up. We started to really understand the downsides when we were seeing 900 new users in there at a time. Seeing things randomly change to Japanese under you is disconcerting as well.

Now when you want to play around with concrete5, you can easily get your own sandbox to play in. After 15 days you can even <hint hint> turn it into a paid hosting account.

Grab your own demo today!

by Franz

Straight to the point:
Stop wasting your time installing c5, we’ll do it for you in our super sweet hosting environment for just $15/month. No hidden fees or startup costs!
http://www.getconcrete5.com/get_started/

Longer explanation:
There’s a very small handful of people who are paid to support this software. As I’m sure you know, the software is free, so the only revenue we get is consulting, merchandise sales, and… hosting!

I’m sure you will understand then why as CEO of c5 I have to pull the plug on having my team personally debug c5 installs on every server setup under the sun. The last few weeks we’ve found more and more of our time going into getting c5 running on super-budget hosts and windows boxes – neither of which we ever thought was a good idea in the first place. Deep down, we love helping people get on the web and of course we want as many people using c5 as we can get.

It is because we want to help the largest majority of people with the biggest problems that we’ve come to the decision that we can no longer personally pay attention to the installation forum every day. There is a good group of very smart volunteers who we dearly hope will continue to give their time helping others here. If one of those folks brings an idea or change to us around the install process we can easily implement, we’ll be happy to do it. Beyond that we’re simply killing ourselves debugging everyone’s unique server setup by hand. I hear the frustration: “Hey I want to use your software and you won’t help me?!?”… Actually, that’s not true…

We’re announcing we’ve slashed our basic hosting plan in half, and eliminated startup fees on http://GetConcrete5.com. For $15/month we’ll gladly setup c5 for you, give you complete access, we’re even going to upgrade your site with the latest stable codebase whenever it’s made available. Frankly I think that’s a deal you can’t beat. We’ll help you, the hosting revenue will help us, everyone wins.

By all means I encourage ongoing discussion around installation issues. I know there are intranets, other web hosts, any number of very valid reasons you might not want to host with us. But if you really feel like you need to find a cheaper deal some where else, please don’t give us attitude for not helping you pull that off.

Thanks for your continued passion and excitement, we’re gonna go back to thinking about the big picture again.
-frz
ceo, c5.