CMS is not really a new word in the computer vocabulary. To describe it in a few lines, a Content Management System is what manages your online content, which can be your blog, forum, articles, gallery, videocast, podcast, magazine or anything. With a bunch of different Content Management Systems already available it’s really difficult to make your own place there.
To name a few, Joomla and Drupal are amongst the most popular CMSes. In fact, WordPress (primarily a blgging platform) also crosses boundaries of being ONLY a blogging platform, which certainly has got many powerful features for being considered as a CMS.
So what features should a GOOD CMS have? I am providing here a list of the features, which I believe, make a CMS really a CMS.
- Dynamic generation of the web content with an optimized database, considering the speed and load on the server.
- User account management with hierarchy of the user levels, which can be extensible as per the administrator’s wish.
- A WYSIWYG type IDE for publishing text and other multimedia.
- Automatic syndication
- Live statistics with all kinds of information for maintenance and improvement of the content.
- In site advanced search, for the usability purpose.
- Should confirm with the web standards, for a nice cross browser compatibility. ( Did I talk about poor IE? )
- Complete separation between the content,structure and it’s presentation, so that different templates could be applied without disturbing the content.
- Content tagging and it’s categorization, which is definitely very important for easy navigation through the web site.
- Build in form wizard, for feedback, contact us types of web forms. Which may be easily extensible with all types of form control elements.
- Blogging and discussion forum with site-wide user management.
- Search engine friendly and Human friendly URLs. Both aspects are again very important.
- With all of these features included, it should super simple, clean, modular and extensible with plugins, templates etc.
Concrete5, is a new and fresh open source CMS which promises to fulfill all of these needs. As the concrete studio blog tagline says “Content management is a human right” they mean it. The CMS is hosted at sourceforge.net with 1390th rank just in 3 months.
concrete5 logo
Actually Concrete5 has not just become so good, that nobody knew about it. The software was used at enterprise level for which you had to spend some good bucks. The conversion into open source — free software is nicely explained by the lines below on this post.
Here’s what I see. The biggest challenge my crew has is bizdev. We’re not perfect at everything, but we sure can deliver sweet stuff and we improve every day, except for sales.
Continuing this further Franz adds
I’m interesting in seeing what a larger open source developer community might contribute to the project from a code standpoint, but I’m hungry for their evangelism about concrete5 to their clients. I don’t need (or want) to own every dollar that is made off of concrete5. Why not just get out of the way and respond to opportunities as they arise as thousands of people deliver concrete5 powered solutions to their clients?
That’s the practical reason to go “free beer.” The real one is better:
Content management is a basic human right.
A very interesting thing about Content5 which puts it on a very special postion. As written on the contribute page of concrete5 webiste–
Got Cash? – making lots of money off of concrete5 and looking for a way to hit the donate button? Well that’s very generous of you, but we don’t want to create any guilt driven “pay what you can” pricing model. Send some money to one of these charities in our name, and mention concrete5 in your project’s press release….
Concrete5 is right on its path to the success…! This again explains “why open source works”. Visit the website once, take a demo of this CMS, you too will be stunned checking it’s beautiful web 2.0 design and features which make the administration just a matter of a few clicks.
update:
concrete5 is taking part in OSCON 2008 this time which is scheduled to be held on 21st July. ( The very first day of OSCON 2008 ). The topic of the session will be A Walk Through of Concrete5 – The Open Source, Edit-in-place Content Management System Made.. Very interestingly, they write on the OSCON 2008 website
After years of being evil software guys, we’ve seen the light and have gone fully open source.
Well, we can see that full glowing light bulb.
Tags: CMS, concrete5, content management system, FOSS, OSCON, web content
July 20th, 2008 at 9:01 pm
Thanks Jal!
You’re right, most of those features you list are already working well after years of selling previous versions of concrete as a commercial product. A few tidbits like a good forum system exist but still need to be ported over and released to the world. As a whole, you get it tho – the world would be a better place if editing ANY website was as simple as posting to a wordpress blog.
-franz
http://concrete5.org
July 22nd, 2008 at 5:26 am
Thanks for the great write-up, Jai! I’m Andrew, CTO of Concrete5, and just wanted to offer a heads-up to anyone who finds this post and is interested, hit us up at concrete5.org.
July 26th, 2008 at 9:13 pm
I am glad to see that OSCON did some good for C5. Kate from Concrete5, was nice enough to spend some time going through some of the main features with me. It is almost time to dump Dr*#al! Thanks again to the folks at C5 for coding such a great CMS.
August 8th, 2008 at 9:59 pm
Nice CMS… concrete5 …. it is the fastest growing CMS in just few months… I think in the next Google summer of code this CMS shall be featured…..
September 8th, 2008 at 6:48 am
Apparently there’s some security issues in the Beta. It looks like this CMS is a few releases away from being release ready.
October 7th, 2008 at 2:01 am
It’s true, we did have a few security issues in our Beta’s. We’re now out of Beta & have resolved those issues. C5 is stable & we’re building a number of sites based on it.
October 14th, 2008 at 3:22 am
So the most apealing thing about a CMS is beyond the content, into the add-ins that can make the site do what you want. I cannot find those from Concrete5, where should I be looking?
November 7th, 2008 at 12:09 pm
just leaving a note that the community site launched at concrete5.org.. an add-ons module library will be showing up there in the next couple of weeks…
November 19th, 2008 at 6:38 pm
True! This is the way CMSes should be built! Being a designer you don’t want to spend couple of months getting into the code just to grasp the functionality of the system. Wich is often required with the most CMSes, if you want to build something nice and useful. I love the intiutive interface and how you build your own templates. I hope they never sell it to Google or Microsucks!
November 19th, 2008 at 7:12 pm
@Zablocki
Right! We can generally scale CMSes on a scale which abstract on one and specific on the other end. The first question while developing a CMS could be, where should the CMS be placed? I find Concrete5 to be transiting at somewhere middle of that scale. That defines its scalability and extensibility.
Now it’s the turn of a user, how can he use the tools provided there!
March 23rd, 2009 at 1:55 am
After trying a dozen of other promising CMSes, I installed C5 and I must say that the intuitive approach of the matter gives me as a selfmade webdesigner the perfect tools to scape my website the way I want it to be.
Definitely my choice
July 12th, 2009 at 1:59 pm
It’s a very interesting subject I was looking around about more information but you got really what i was looking for in your article so thanks and keep it up you have a great blog .
I’m very interested in CMS and all its related subjects.