Concrete The Studio

by Franz

Okay so we routinely hear from people that have setup concrete5 on some cloud based web server and find it slow. My answer is routinely, “Well of course, what would you expect out of something called ‘the cloud’ – speed?”

The cloud makes a lot of sense to me if you have a huge number of small computing tasks. Need to store a load of data? Sure. Want to convert a kaballion images from one format to another? Perfect solution. Even if you’ve got a simple webapp that you want to be able to replicate a million times some morning when you get Dugg – okay, as long as the app is pretty light weight and you design it with this in mind.

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by Franz

Open Source CMS concrete5 Gets Even Sexier to Use, and Catches the Eye of Drupal and Joomla! Developers at SXSW.

Portland, OR (PRWEB) March 29, 2010 — concrete CMS was commercial software that went open source in late 2008, quickly winning project of the month on SourceForge and much attention from a community of open source fans used to dealing with painful user experiences and scattered code. During the last year the core team behind concrete5 has been flushing out features in their CMS, along with building an active community and marketplace at concrete5.org. Now with the release of version 5.4 concrete5 has really hit its stride and the core team expects continued great growth this summer.

concrete5 powers over 35,000 websites today, with a developer community some 18,000 members strong. “We’ve grown very quickly since going open source,” says CTO Andrew Embler. “The core application has always been very stable, but in the past we knew there were a few areas we wanted to clean up. With the sitemap improvements and even faster AJAX editing in 5.4 we’ve really covered the big items on my radar. ”

Some architectural changes to better support the needs of enterprise level clients have already allowed some larger organizations to choose concrete5 over Drupal, Joomla!, and Wordpress. The additional changes to fully embrace the Zend framework by using Zend Cache and Zend Translate has proven well worth the investment.

“It was great fun showing off the release candidate of 5.4 at SXSW:Interactive this year,’ says Franz Maruna, CEO. “We met a lot of Joomla! and Drupal developers who begrudgingly gave us 5 minutes to see the competition, only to walk away 20 minutes later lamenting about time they’d wasted on other systems. I think we showed quite a few people that you can build big powerful sites with concrete5 that really are easy to use.”

See the complete feature list in 5.4 here:
http://www.concrete5.org/documentation/background/version_history/version-5-4-0/

About concrete5
concrete CMS is a leading developer of next- generation open source solutions for web sites. The company’s flagship product, concrete5, combines the ease-of-use of a blogging platform with the flexibility and power of a web development platform. To date, thousands of advertising and creative agencies and web developers around the world have downloaded concrete5 for free and used the technology to quickly and inexpensively build enterprise-quality web sites that can be updated by end users. concrete CMS is a privately held company based in Portland, Oregon, and manages the concrete5.org project. For more information, please visit http://www.concrete5.org.

Contact:
Franz Maruna
503-235-0606
franz (at) concrete5.org

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 Andrew Embler

Thanks to the Usagi Project for putting this video together.

The full HD version can be found here.

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

We just got lucky enough to get another interview! CMSCritic.com is a good looking site that I had never run into before they linked to us. You should check them out.

It looks like they’ve been super busy putting together a reasonably comprehensive list of CMS’s (as much as CMSMatrix.org’s community populated one seems to be.) It also looks like they’re taking a little more of a design centric/portal approach than opensourcecms.com has.

Any way you slice it, you should check out the interview.

by Franz

Ever since osCon08 we’ve been getting this question a lot. We even got it from the Drupal volunteers who essentially asked ‘with Drupal in the world, why would you even build another CMS?’ I think the answer is pretty obvious from just watching the screencast or playing with the demo on concrete5.org, but here’s some thoughts I’ve had with people via email recently:

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by kate

So we’re all home relaxing after two grueling days at OSCON. Maybe “grueling” is the wrong word; we had a great time and met a lot of really interesting people, and we got to talk our jaws off about Concrete5. (The phrase “PHP-based content management system” becomes kind of a tongue-twister after a while.) I didn’t get much of a chance to check out the other exhibitors’ booths, because we had a constant stream of people checking out our stuff and I felt compelled to verbally inundate them all with how great Concrete5 is. I did, however, get a chance to utterly destroy Franz at a two-foot-high game of chess, met and Facebook-friended Facebook, and gave a whole lot of people screwdrivers. If any of you OSCON attendees find your way over here, thanks for giving Concrete5 such a warm reception. We’re worn out, but we had a blast.

by kate

We’re at osCon this week! Come check us out!

by Andrew Embler

…For editing, at least. Sites built with Concrete5 will work in any browser, if they’re coded for it. But the editing interface and the dashboard, both of which feature some pretty complex interface work, are only supported in:

• Safari 2+
• Internet Explorer 7+
• Firefox 2

Other browsers, like Camino and Opera, will likely support Concrete5 just fine. But IE 6 will not. Not even close. As I was mulling over this blog post I caught another one on the same topic. It seems that Apple is doing exactly the same thing with their forthcoming suite of web applications, MobileMe. 

Not bad company to be in, and necessary. The sheer amount of time that goes into debugging things for one specific, eight-year-old browser is mind-boggling. However, dropping IE 6 support is not without its pitfalls: the sheer amount of time saved might overwhelm the typical developer, as she finds herself with much less to do and much less stress about the web in general. The key is to fill this time with something productive. Try tending a garden; read a lengthy Russian novel; teach yourself Spanish; take a cooking class.

(Oh, and install that IE 8 beta in some of your free time – it’ll be released before you know it. And Firefox 3 just came out, so you’d better download that. And Opera 9.5. And Safari 4 is on the horizon.)

Maybe you’d better read a shorter novel after all.

by Andrew Embler

Hey all, this is Andrew. I’m Director of Technology here at Concrete Websites, and I’m going to take the reins from Franz for a second.

I’ve been making websites for more than ten years – first as a production/HTML guy, then a web and database programmer, and now as a director of some very talented programmers. Through it all, a number of things have remained constant. One of those is the impressive amount of bullshit involved when talking about the web. For example, in preparing for this post I took a trip to The Web Economy Bullshit Generator, and while its layout is dated, its content is as hilarious and spot-on today as it was when it debuted. And as the web changes, new sites have arisen to chronicle its changing lexicon. Everyone, it seems, is hatin’ on buzzwords.

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by kate

On February 28th – 2006, Franz Maruna led a discussion for the Portland Development Commission on eCommerce. Franz Maruna is CEO of Concrete CMS, a local web application developer. The PDC is launching a new eCommerce program to encourage web industry growth in Portland Oregon.

These ten rules were discussed as good starting points and lessons learned for running successful retail operations on the internet.

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