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 »
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 »
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
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.
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 »
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
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:
Link to your site with your name in lights. (no we won’t make it blink, but yes thats the idea)
We’ll send you a free c5kit, or $55 (us) via paypal - your choice.
We’ll be very thankful to you, and its nice when people are thankful.
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…
Lemonade.com lets people create a widget that contains different products for sale from companies like Apple and EBGames and easily place this “lemonade stand” on social networking sites and blogs. People then earn referral fees when people buy products via their stand.
At Enhanced Books, users get the chance to experience audio and video content for books, akin to an extras menu on a DVD. With the release of their newest book, Reckless Road: Guns ‘n Roses and the Making of Appetite for Destruction, the owners of Enhanced Books felt that their site needed a major overhaul.
Wow, what a year.
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.
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…