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.

Read the rest of this entry »

by Franz

Wow. If you haven’t heard the drama, you should watch this video. In short, a premium theme developer (DYITthemes) which sells a wordpress theme named Thesis does not release it under the GPL license.

Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder and leader of Wordpress is calling him out on it; “when you violate someone’s license it is breaking the law. It’s a definition of breaking the law.”

Chris Pearson says he doesn’t have to release his theme under the GPL “They are not the highest authority node up on the tree that gets to decide everything that happens underneath them.”

You can watch them get all sassy with each other for an hour, if you want. Plenty of people have and some of them are asking for our view on it.

concrete5 is a competitor to Wordpress in ways, and we had to choose a license when we started as well. We specifically did NOT choose the GPL for exactly this reason. Here’s how we see it…

1) Much of this is about distribution. Our understanding of this is pretty simple:

If Thesis is distributed as a stand alone download that /includes/ a copy of Wordpress, then Chris is legally wrong. If you distribute GPL software, everything you add to it has to be GPL compatible. Clear and simple, period.

If Thesis is distributed on its own, I think Chris might have an argument to make. It’s easy to think “hey this does nothing without Wordpress, it is dependent on it, it needs to honor whatever legal requirements Wordpress comes up with” but I don’t think that’s technically true. The GPL is about the copying and distribution of software and it doesn’t really cover this with a tremendous amount of clarity. There’s plenty of examples that would have been a lot more interesting to discuss than what they did in the interview. For example, just because you’ve written software that runs on Linux doesn’t mean it has to be GPL. If you distribute Linux WITH your software as a single solution it does however. How’s that for weird?

Regardless, Chris would have a much better high ground to stand on if Thesis actually worked with different CMS backends – much the way that C# application you wrote for linux could also run on a variety of other operating systems.

2) Matt seems like an awful nice guy, and Pearson comes off like a total douche in this interview. I’ve never met either, I’m sure they’re both awesome, I’m just saying after losing an hour to listening to this crap there’s a pretty clear answer for who I’d like to have a beer with. That’s a tremendous shame because frankly Chris is the underdog here trying to build and maintain a nice small business and Wordpress is the big player trying to squash entrepreneurialism. Regardless, Matt comes off as the hero cause he’s a nice guy and Chris comes off poorly because of the way he makes his arguments. Important lessons there, it’s probably time for us to do a better job stripping drupal references from our customer testimonials.

3) Wow you can tell the difference that some funding makes. Let me just be clear about what I believe to be the real motivators here, please correct me if I’m mis-informed: Wordpress  Automattic has raised over $40m in venture capital. They have over 25 million blogs out there, and fundamentally they are in the content business. They don’t make their real money by selling wordpress, or taking a cut of marketplace add-ons, or offering paid hosting, or any of the stuff we do, they make their money on content. The advertising value on wordpress.com is huge. You have 25 million individuals using your platform to create content, you can monetize that in big ways. That’s why wordpress may be frequently used as a CMS to build some corporate site, but you’ll never see their core team drop features that help my wife (who has an active wordpress blog about DIY sewing), in favor of features that make some corporate extranet easier to run. Matt doesn’t have to worry about making payroll in two weeks, he has to worry about balancing ads and content on Wordpress.com so my wife keeps going there to find other cool sewing blogs she wants to cross link to. Wordpress’s real competitors are Twitter, Facebook, Google – they’re in that big business of re-inventing media. That’s why the GPL makes sense to them. The more wordpress is out there, the better for wordpress, as long as it’s called Wordpress.

Chris on the other hand is selling a Theme that helps turn Wordpress into a application that does something more. Again I’m just guessing here, but it wouldn’t shock me at all to hear Chris’s company is self funded, profitable, and it hasn’t been easy to get there. The idea of having a product that you sell at $50 a pop being distributed for free or even worse sold for $49 somewhere else has to make him physically sick. The carrot of “but people will want you for support” is a pretty grim answer.

I’m not arguing that Matt has an easy life and Chris doesn’t. Certainly the stress of looking Phil Black in the eye and saying “yes your $40m will turn into $800 million, sir” can’t be fun. I’m just saying the two challenges are very different and you can read the distinction in motivation from just the tone of their voices alone.

4) The GPL is stupid, and O’Reilly did us all a tremendous disservice when he came up with “open source”. Yeah I said it, so blah! When I was a developer growing up in the 80’s, we had licenses that actually meant what they said. If you wanted to just give something away, you called it Freeware. If you wanted to save some money on sales but still own your software, you called it Shareware or Crippleware depending on if you offered a fully functional copy with additional features or if you did something like disable save. These labels came from the DIY software world where entrepreneurs could start successful businesses cheap by distributing stuff on BBS’s. (go look up Apogee Games). Meanwhile there were any number of “big” projects that were being distributed under licenses that made sense for schools and huge corporate problems. NASA develops some standard and wants to share it with the world, how do they do that? Several big software vendors see value in a piece of software existing, but not being “owned” by any commercial entity, how do they do that? Everyone wrote their own license and while it was confusing, it worked. Then in the late 90’s the successful technical book publisher O’Reilly came along and dubbed everything I’ve listed as “Open Source” for the benefit of the media which was having a hard time understanding how Linux could compete with Windows. Well that’s cool and all, certainly having concepts that everyone can understand in a word is great, but clearly we aren’t really there. Confusion abounds. People talk about “free beer vs. free speech” all the time, it sounds like a broken record. Any one with half a brain knows that nothing worth having in life is truly free (in cost), yet we also agree that the idea buying a car with the hood welded shut sounds like getting screwed. The goal to provide some clarity across all the different types of licenses that software was released under by calling half “open source” and the other half “commercial” has utterly failed.

5) You say you want freedom? Then the GPL isn’t for you. It is not “freedom” to force people who extend your software to honor ANYTHING you say. I’m not saying it isn’t a good business idea, I imagine it may frequently be a great business idea, but it’s not “freedom” so don’t try to take the moral high ground. You’re limiting people and it doesn’t matter that the perceived motivation of your limit is to enforce further freedom. Freedom doesn’t work that way, but proponents of the GPL seem to think it needs protection. Here’s how we see it:

If you’re for the GPL, you believe freedom is a fragile flower that has to be protected. “This started as free, we’re going to make sure it says free with all our impressive powers.”

If you’re against the GPL, you believe freedom is a force of nature. It may not look that powerful at a glance, but it’s gonna win in the end. It’s like entropy. It exists, it will win. It doesn’t need your help, all it needs is your awareness and faith, and sooner or later it’ll come out on top.

Freedom is the MIT license which to paraphrase in three words says : “Don’t sue us”. If your goal really is to give something away for no cost and have the world be “free” to do whatever it wants with it, that’s all you need. Limit the creators exposure to liability, which would limit their own freedom, and you’ve made it “free.” Of course if you do that you run the risk of someone taking your software packing it up and screwing you over in any number of ways, but no one said freedom was easy.

These issues with the GPL are not new, and it’s sad to see this play out yet again. Frankly I like to think that any legal document’s job is to create clarity, and whatever your view may be, its clear the GPL is pretty gray in spots. In some ways, I hope this does go to court so we can all get a clear answer on how this thing is supposed to work.

Meanwhile if you want to be part of something that is free, and is eager to be free in a simple understandable way, you should be developing stuff for concrete5.

UPDATE : Orrrrr I’m completely wrong.

As more debate continues in IRC and other forums a point has come up that we didn’t address in the original post. Thesis uses wordpress’s theme engine and that includes any number of lines of code that wordpress wrote. Clearly that is their work, covered by their license, and Thesis is a derivative of it. THAT being the case, he very well may be violating the GPL. What gets interesting there is where is the line for that not being derivative? If he just goes through and renames all the functions and variables but it functions the same way, is that new work? What if he changes some logic too, for loops become while loops, etc. Where is the line where something is no longer derivative but a new thing?

What if Thesis makes an abstraction layer from scratch that does nothing but give them some differently named hooks to the same stuff, and then releases THAT abstraction layer LGPL and continues to sell their theme? That sounds legal, annoyingly stupid but legal.

Regardless the fact that everyone’s so confused about this does bring serious questions to the fore on the worth of GPL and what ‘freedom’ means. I hope we find out.

by Franz

(Pulled from here: http://www.concrete5.org/about/our_philosophy/a-letter-to-php-developers/)

Hi,

I’m Franz, I used to be a developer, now I write emails. I was programming logo in first grade, I was running BBS’s in the 80’s, hacking together sites with SSI and PHPv3 in the 90’s. Now I run concrete5.org with Andrew, who grew up hacking IRC and has worked with me for over a decade. We built concrete5 after years of consulting and frustration with other systems.

I know there are thousands of content management systems, and the learning curve for any new system is a beast, so I applaud the fact that you’ve bothered to look for something new and have read this far at all. Let me tell you a few things about where we’re coming from that might help you continue to find the energy to get under the hood of concrete5:

1. We talk about “path of least resistance” around the office a lot. This means creating elegant solutions to real problems. You can’t get too high-level or you’ve just added a layer of confusion. You can’t get too specific because you’ll end up re-writing it constantly. It’s about finding what the consistent elements of the challenge are and building a solution that addresses them while offering complete flexibility around everything else. Path of least resistance doesn’t mean cutting corners, it means spending the time to understand a problem and create strong tools for building all the types of solutions you’ll need in the future.
2. Object oriented code is a good means to an end – but it’s not the goal. The goal is having reusable code that someone can understand at a glance. If I had to spend 30 minutes looking for a single line of code that is buried 10 directories deep in a file with nothing else in it, chances are you’ve failed in meeting the goal, even though you’re strictly OOP. That doesn’t mean procedural is good, it just means quality is about thoughtful balance.
3. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. It’s fun to brainstorm but lets not pretend every idea is a good one. I personally am the proud owner of many bad ideas. Every feature added means that much more risk of edge case bugs, so lets debate the value/cost ratio of that feature. Just because we’re “open source” doesn’t mean we’re socialist hippies. Lets also not forget that the first 80% of building something is relatively fun and easy, it’s the last 20% of dialing it in that will kill you.
4. Less is more. These are websites, not rocket-ships. A page on a website is just a page. While concrete5 certainly has a learning curve and you will need to invest a little energy to get started, you should find the number of concepts you have to grapple with to be far lower than what you’ve grown accustomed to.
5. From the ground up concrete5 was designed to be a CMS. We built this as our tool box to make picky agency clients happy. It’s not a blog that people use as a CMS. It’s not a news site that had features draped on it until it served no particular market and got dubbed a CMS. It is a well thought-out framework that was designed to let crazy clients manage a great looking website, with next to no training.

If you’re hot under the collar right now because I just made it clear I’m not going to automatically approve your add-on when it doesn’t follow standards, or that I’ve failed to understand that your computer science teacher is a god amongst men – chances are you’re going to find your developer glory elsewhere. If these points resonate with you, keep exploring. You’ll find a nicely thought out system that follows MVC and OOP practices where they add value, and helps you get your job done faster and more effectively in the real world.

Best wishes
Franz Maruna
CEO, Concrete CMS Inc.

by Franz

Hey Gang,

I’m writing you from lovely Austin TX as we wrap up our exhibit hall stuff at SXSW. It’s been super fun and a LOT of people seem really excited about concrete5. We’ve met plenty of directors of huge companies and consultancies, new media reporters, all sorts of folks, but often its the Joomla developers who have the most amusing response. After starting slow with a “I guess I’ll check it out” and then going through a couple “Holy-Moly its that easy?!?” moments they end up leaving somewhat disgruntled. “Where the h#ll have you guys been? I just wasted 2 years learning Joomla and it took me 10 minutes to get as far as it took me 2 weeks to do in it!”.. That’s good stuff.

Thought we should also let everyone know we FINALLY re-did our documentation and it’s waaaay better now. We still have some pages we want to add, but now everything is nicely organized and makes sense with a cool slidey jump nav. We even hooked it into our forum system using some tags and a “helpful answer” system so instead of those annoying guestbook comments that just grew out of control, our doc pages can start discussions that remain encapsulated but are still searchable.

concrete5.4 is out as a Release Candidate now so you should certainly check that out and let us know if its ready to ship. We think it just about is.

Thanks for your attention,

best

-frz

ps: here’s pics from SXSW.

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 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

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

Well, we’ve been talking about our community marketplace for weeks now, and the first step is finally complete. We reorganized concrete5.org, buffed out the documentation features, added a job board, built out forums – even added a bounties forum where you can get paid to help on the project.

This just the beginning of new stuff you’ll be seeing on concrete5.org in the coming weeks. There will be a large theme library, a blocks and applications marketplace, and much more. Right now we need your help buffing out the content in forums and giving us any feedback you can.

Check it out!

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

The c5 docs need some love, and we’re adding to them every day. That being said, we need your help explaining how c5 solves YOUR problems. We know people are already building blocks and themes with c5, we want you to tell us how!

Write a how-to. Tell us how you built that custom block, or how you took your design and built a concrete5 site out of it. Please make it a little more technical than just “here’s my site” – ask yourself “could someone else learn something out of what I’m writing?”

Give us written words with pictures, or go out on a limb and do a screencast. We’ll accept either.

If we deem it helpful enough to post to the concrete5.org site, we will:

1. Link to your site with your name in lights. (no we won’t make it blink, but yes thats the idea)
2. We’ll send you a free c5kit, or $55 (us) via paypal – your choice.
3. We’ll be very thankful to you, and its nice when people are thankful.