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.

1. Dynamic generation of the web content with an optimized database, considering the speed and load on the server.
2. User account management with hierarchy of the user levels, which can be extensible as per the administrator’s wish.
3. A WYSIWYG type IDE for publishing text and other multimedia.
4. Automatic syndication
5. Live statistics with all kinds of information for maintenance and improvement of the content.
6. In site advanced search, for the usability purpose.
7. Should confirm with the web standards, for a nice cross browser compatibility. ( Did I talk about poor IE? )
8. Complete separation between the content,structure and it’s presentation, so that different templates could be applied without disturbing the content.
9. Content tagging and it’s categorization, which is definitely very important for easy navigation through the web site.
10. Build in form wizard, for feedback, contact us types of web forms. Which may be easily extensible with all types of form control elements.
11. Blogging and discussion forum with site-wide user management.
12. Search engine friendly and Human friendly URLs. Both aspects are again very important.
13. 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 1390^th 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.