Concrete5 — A NextGen Open Source CMS

July 20, 2008 · Archived

CMS is not really a new word in the internet 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, galleries and more.

To name a few, Joomla and Drupal are amongst the most popular CMSes. In fact, WordPress (primarily a blogging platform) also crosses boundaries of being ONLY a blogging platform, which certainly has got a lot to do with its plugin architecture.

What features should a GOOD CMS have?

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.
Complete separation between the content structure and its presentation, so that different templates could be applied without disturbing the content.
Content tagging and its categorization, which is definitely very important for easy navigation through the website.
Built in form wizard, for feedback, contact us types of web forms.
Blogging and discussion forum with site-wide user management.
Search engine friendly and Human friendly URLs.
With all of these features included, it should be 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.

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 has made it accessible to everyone.

Update: Concrete5 took part in OSCON 2008 which was scheduled to be held on 21st July. The topic of the session was "A Walk Through of Concrete5 – The Open Source, Edit-in-place Content Management System Made."

This is an archived post from 2008.