Concrete The Studio

by Franz

This was fun!

Got to talk about how and why concrete5 got started, what my own background is, and what makes a startup work. It’s always flattering to be called a “go-getter.”

Here’s the link to the site: http://www.go-getters.ideatewith.com

Also, here’s the iTunes link: http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/go-getters/id337491910

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

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.”
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by Andrew Embler

Thanks to the Usagi Project for putting this video together.

The full HD version can be found here.

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.
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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 Gang,

We’re gonna go off topic a bit here, but it’s my right to rant. This is the first day I have ever truly felt proud to be from the United States of America. When I was in high-school, forming my view of the world, we were in the first Iraq war – which I could see even then was an Oil rush, not a moral issue. If you’ve read much of the philosophical rants here, you know I’ve got no love for authority, so I really had nothing much positive to say about my country. When I saw the stars and stripes fluttering in the wind, all I really saw was hypocrisy and a new form of corporate colonial abuse around the world. Certainly the last 8 years have been beyond embarrassing.

While 9/11 was certainly a horrible event, to have the response be a declared war on a tactic and a general closing down of the communication process is inexcusable. To let it fester for a second term was beyond depressing. I find myself in Portland, Oregon frequently only surrounded by people with a similar world view – so to be part of a country that seemed to be so wholly missing the point was horrible. I wondered if our system was truly broken beyond repair. I wondered if our international reputation was broken beyond repair. I wondered if this was a place I wanted to raise my family.

Last night I became a new man. We had all heard the polls, we all had given our time and money to Barack, but still we all assumed McCain would win in some inexplicable evil way. Maybe Diebold would just hand him the vote, maybe there really were millions of closet racists as the media kept implying with the “Bradley Effect” – who knew, but the seldom voiced opinion of all of my friends was “snowball’s chance in hell” that a man named Barack Hussein Obama would be our President. But.. Amazingly..

He DOMINATED.. 2:1 in the electoral college!! took ALL of the battle ground states – none of this waiting around for a week while the lawyers hash it out – we knew while still having an after dinner drink! It was a clear and total victory and I couldn’t be prouder.

I feel like we just made a stronger move in the “war on terror” with that one vote than we did in the 8 years of that cowboy dicking around. I feel like if I were to be on an international tour, I’d be PROUD to have an American Flag on my backpack because we may not be perfect (my God that’s clear) but we’re able to do a 180 degree switch and elect a black man with the middle name of Hussein to the most powerful job in the world. “Give us your tired, your poor” because you TRULY can make something of yourself here. This country is NOT just a good-ol-boys network and we’re NOT Rome falling to chaos – the best truly IS yet to come and it’s going to make the WHOLE WORLD a better place.

Ya know I got truly excited about Barack almost 2 years ago now when I read a New Yorker article detailing his most enduring trait – the inherent ability to be a diplomat. Take two people with completely different views on something, accept that there is no “us and them” – no “good and evil”, but rather help them find common ground and a new understanding about how we all can get along. Its about communication and I believe that through open communication we can solve everything and anything. Frankly, I wouldn’t have chosen to give away c5 for nothing if I didn’t deeply believe that. Freedom of expression is freedom.

I honestly believe Barack Obama IS empathy and communication incarnate. I don’t think it’s gonna be easy, and I’m sure he’s gonna make us all work hard for it, but get ready for some actual thoughtful, deliberate, caring understanding and bridge building from your friends in the good old U, S of fuckin A.

PS: sorry about the last 8 years again.. uhh. mulligan?

PPS: I’d love to hear from our international friends as I know c5 is used as much out of the states as in em..
-frz

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

Yeah that’s right. C5 rocks so amazingly hard that SourceForge decided to make us Project of The Month after only being on their site for 3 months! We’ve always thought of source forge as the Rolling Stone of open source – so we took some liberties with our photos…

Check out the whole article here!

Yay, THANK YOU SourceForge…

by Franz

you gotta see it, particularly the flash demo.

be a pal and pay us to host your site…

by Franz

Mark Moore says:

“Thanks for letting me play with C5 at OSCON. How many people did you meet that week? YIKES!!! I switched over from Drupal to C5 within a day. I am loving it! Thanks a bunch for the demo.”

Here’s his bike – which looks equally fast… oh wait, what’s that on the front? Guess we’re not the only ones who love c5, that’s an awfully nice lookin’ machine!

thanks Mark, you rock!

Want some c5 stickers and a multi-purpose “concrete5″ screwdriver too? Just drop us a line with your address. Stick your sticker somewhere equally cool, and send us a picture.

by Franz

Well no one on our end posted to you, because you’re quite clear that Beta projects shouldn’t be posted in your rules… and yes.. we read rules.. sometimes.

However, someone from your end must of been at osCon because we appeared on your site a few days ago. Here’s a snapshot of our google analytics for the last month:

Gotta say, we were gonna wait till we had a release we were calling final before posting to you, OpenSourceCMS.com. The fact that we just magically showed up is great! We’ll just take that as a pat on the back that what we consider Beta is pretty damn stable, and we’d like to say thanks.

(ps: hey reader, wanna help? vote for us on their site. when they first added us they linked to our demo in such a way that it wouldn’t work so we got some low votes that are messing up our average.)

by Franz

Just a quickie video I put together over the weekend of our experience at OsCon this year. Thanks o’Reilly!

by Franz

looks like some of the emerging c5 community is starting to talk about what we’re doing on their own blogs.. here’s a couple of the posts we’ve found, by all means comment if we missed ya:

http://www.codeblog.ch/2008/07/cms-concrete5/

http://jaipandya.com/2008/07/concrete5-a-nextgen-open-source-cms/

thanks!