Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Totally Random Episode 9 – A visit with TOPCON
by Franz
Hey! Andrew again, and I’m going to recap the news.
This Week’s News
- Launched some Add-ons:
- I released sone new how-to’s:
- We talk about 1260.ca and Alpe! Winter
- We asked you to help us with more reviews at hotscripts.com
How we assign your karma raffle numbers
We have three databases – one for each type of contribution (Promotion, Helping People, and Developing). For each Karma point a user has in a silo they get a number of tickets assigned to their name so we end up with 1,000,000 total tickets. Then to build random numbers from the data points in the TOPCON video.
The Winners, and What They Got
Watch the video to see who won what.
Totally Random Episode 8
by Franz
This Week’s News
- Launched some Add-ons:
- I released two new how-to’s:
- We talk about Genco’s Intranet, a great showcase of what concrete5 can do for the Enterprise.
- We mention sixRevisions, vandelayDesign, and DesignM.ag
- We asked you to help us with more reviews atopenSourceCMS.com
Totally Random – Episode 2
by Franz
This Week’s News
- Just one of many awesome showcase submissions - Loula Creates.
- We welcome six new add-ons and one new commercial theme to our marketplace: MailChimp, Goodsoil eCommerce Theme, Who’s Online, Yosemite Theme, Terra Firma Theme, iCal template (for the calendaradd-on), Dojo Tour Dates and Dojo Google Translate.
- I released a new how-to detailing everything that can be done with the Auto-Nav block. It can also be read and commented on at andrewembler.com. If you’ve ever had a question about how the Auto-Nav works, what it’s options mean, how to theme it or extend it, you should check out that primer.
Softaculous supports concrete5 now!
by Franz
It’s our clear goal to get concrete5 on every well configured web server on earth. A nice script installing app called Softaculous has just added concrete5 to the stuff they support install for. That’s great news to us and we’re happy to be working directly with Softaculous so hopefully version updates will be smooth sailing for concrete5 fans.
Thanks Softaculous!
new weekly concrete5 video show!
by Franz
Well if you’ve been paying attention to concrete5.org recently you’ve seen some fairly cool new stuff like the Karma system. Now we’re launching a weekly video show “Totally Random” where we share news on concrete5 and interesting things we bump into along the way. Check out our super rough but amusing pilot here:
Just launched Digital Downloads and a handful of other add-ons/themes
by Franz
Hey gang,
Just a quick note to announce some new add-ons & themes in our marketplace:
eCommerce 1.7.1 – a new version that supports with support for optional checkout parameters, price-affecting customer choices (e.g. size XL adds $3 to base cost) and more currency formatting.
Digital Downloads 1.0 – and add-on for eCommerce that lets you securely offer digital files to your customers after purchase.
RSS Feed Manager – Create and configure rich-text feeds for your site.
Tell a Friend Form – Cross promotion for your site.
Search Tools – A searchable page list interface.
Highslide Web Album – Another cool image gallery
Dojo Storyboard designer – Make a wireframe/cartoon like storyboard
And a bunch of new Themes too:
Splash
Diamond
Silk
Camilo
Creme – includes eCommerce templates!
Instill
Pluralism
Thanks to all our 3rd part developers for helping grow concrete5!
concrete5 Announces new Web Architecture Appliance (WAA)
by Franz
Revolutionary Device Simplifies the Architecture Process for ‘Problem Clients’
Portland, OR (PRWEB) April 1, 2010 – concrete5 is an open source content management system that powers over 35,000 websites – from tiny churches to major institutions and startups. Now the concrete CMS team has created a new appliance to deliver project success with even the most difficult client.
The process of using a Web Architecture Appliance (WAA) is nothing short of shocking. A base concrete5 install is setup on a webserver, and connected to a computer using the WAA via USB. The client simply lays one hand on the sensor on top, and starts describing their vision for the site in their own tone.
“Leveraging this level of synergy has been a dream of mine for ages,” says Lead Developer Ryan Tyler. “I’ve had clients who just couldn’t communicate in real terms at all. I can’t count the times I’ve heard ‘I’m not really sure – but you know what I’m talking about’ on a fixed budget. Well I don’t, but now I can hook them up to the WAA and problem solved. It’s amazing.”
Andrew Embler, CTO explains “hardware is not easy, and certainly inferring what someone actually needs when the direction is ‘it needs more buttons’ is no small challenge either. That’s why we knew we had to do this. ”
Learn more about the WAA here.
Search concrete5.org directly from Firefox
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.
Yay! Bunch of concrete5 news..
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.
Lord Maruna is displeased with the Hotel Tria(ge).
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 »
Happy new year.
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
With 2009, there shall be….. “Partner Program$”
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,
Just launched new concrete5.org site… need sleep badly.
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
We’ll host your c5 site for just $15/month!
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.
c5 sticker sighting… best thing ever.
by Franz
Okay, so I’m not sure that amount of sticker glue is healthy… but.. wow.. we’re impressed…
Got some pics of where you put your stickers? Send em in. Want some stickers? Visit concrete5.org and let us know.