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.
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!
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!
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 »
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.
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.
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
I’m reading Ray Kurzweil who says the the Singularity is Near. While nay-sayers claim his science is questionable, I say he sounds pretty bright to me. The basic gist is because of exponential growth in technology (ie Moore’s law) we’re on the cusp of revolutionary changes in what it means to be human. We will transcend our bodies through technologies ranging from advanced medical DNA engineering to nano technology and the internet itself. We will become immortal within 20 years. (…says Ray) Read the rest of this entry »
…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.
From the beginning, Concrete has been designed as a system that makes the creation of pages easy, with a flexible “block” system available for placing items of content within these pages. As Concrete has matured, new data types have been created for different types of tasks. In Concrete5, for example, we have all sorts of these: single pages, page types, themes, blocks, elements, user attributes, page attributes, email templates, and more.
So, after a bit too much sun and tequilla, I’m back at work after a couple of weeks on the Yucatan. Back to the “real world”. It’s a bit of an adventure emersing yourself in a foriegn country where you barely speak the language. The strange thing is that first week I was surrounded by not spanish speakers, but chain smoking germans. I was studying at a small spanish school down there where most of the residents were from northern europe. Fortunately for me, most of the europeans knew about 4 or 5 languages, so english became the spoken language when I was in the room. I was staying in Playa Del Carmen, which is a cool little beach town that has become the fastest growing city in North America. It’s a lot cheaper & more laid back than the spring-break-partier destination of Cancun to the north. After refreshing my poor Spanish skills in Playa I rented a car (driving in Mexico is insane btw. One-way streets and individual lanes are sort of arbitrary concepts there). I headed south to spend a few days in these primitive cabana-bungalows in Tulum, which turned out to be on a nude beach. Then ventured inland to explore the various mayan ruin sites around the peninsula. Uxmal was probably the highlight. A good trip all and all. It definity served its intended purpose of giving some time to reflect and to momentarily re-evaluate this strange american culture we live in.
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.
Just catching up on my New Yorker articles and read this interesting one by Eric Alterman about the death of the newspaper.
Yes, newspapers are dying, in fact - they predict the last one will be delivered to the last door on 2043 (not sure how they came to that, but yay for trees.)
The real point I took from the article was “good God! this is horrid, because original reporting is HARD and EXPENSIVE… Blogging is all well and good, but all bloggers do is pontificate and comment on other original sources”… which to a great degree is true.. (omg, is that me admitting to being full of bs?)
