Concrete The Studio

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.

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

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!

by Franz

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)
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by Franz

So I originally architected Concrete CMS in a nice little bar in SE Portland to deal with an adCouncil gig we had with too many stakeholders and not enough time. That was many years ago, and since the early days my dear friend and comrade Andrew Embler has taken the lose direction outlined in my sketchbook of “blocks and collections” and made it work on fixed budgets for demanding clients. Concrete has had some really compelling concepts since those early days, but like any box of tools you use hard - there’s some idiosyncrasies that drive you up the wall. Being the guy finally responsible for training clients, and getting content into working sites that make sense - I’ve been looking forward to getting my hands on the complete re-haul concrete5 for some time. I’ve peered over shoulders a lot, but today was the first time I got to play with it on a site I need to deal with.

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by Franz

Concrete has been around since 2003, this major version update that has been a year in the works and is major version release 5. While our content management system has always been “open source” to our clients, who paid for it; this is the first fully “free beer” open source release we’ve done. We’re giving away our secret sauce and we’re thinking how to protect the years and millions in development that have gone into it.

We’ve come to recognize it’s the brand. We will trademark our name as Concrete5(tm) - and make money by being the official host, trainer, documenter, and support provider. Conversely we may look at any of those roles and tap a better suited partner as an “Official Concrete5 Solution” in return for some license or revenue model.

The Ruby on Rails guy looks to have similar ideas around his brand and license model, which is also MIT.