http://www.lullabot.com/blog/announcing-drupal-ue-usability-edition

After seeing that we made the unofficial motto of our team, “We Put Your Stuff On the Internet”

Small pointy: how does one create folders in File Manager?

@Raphael- That seems like a self serving comment, are you related to the development of this silex project? I think we can all safely say that we don’t want a flash based cms.

@saba- I get help on the c5 site every time I look….

Totally easy to use. This CMS is built to appear just as you subconsciously want it to appear. Everything from Sitemap trees to easy navigational menus make this CMS easy for anybody to comprehend. Not only this, but just as much focus was placed under the hood as was on the graphics, meaning that this tool is just as powerful as it is pretty. The PHP is flexible, and it usually takes a lot of mistakes before the CMS starts to complain. I have also been impressed with how easy and effortless it is to install add-ons, create backups, and initiate updates, literally a click of the button!

And its not often that when you need help, the CEO himself is there to assist! The customer service for this CMS is outstanding, as well as the community.

No matter who you are, a secretary who only understands Microsoft Word to a professional Web Developer, this tool is the best one out there for you, hands-down.

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_BOOLEAN_OR in /home/xxxx/public_html/modules/mod_virtuemart/vm_select.php on line 51

Built-in versioning even makes it quick and easy to undo changes someone has made, and thank to a good user and group setup you can even ensure only certain users and/or groups have access to particular pages or even blocks.

For designers and developers, creating themes has been the simplest implementation I have ever done for any CMS.

There is a marketplace of full of add-ons and themes. Many cost a little, but they are affordable and there are a lot of free ones too.
One thing to remember is that Concrete5 itself is also FREE.

The community is not as strong as it is for other CMSs, but it is growing and most importantly it is a friendly community, which is what many CMS communities are not these days.

Most documentation is around in the community forums and in the how-tos.
This means that you have to do some searching for the answers you need, but you can usually find what you are looking for in a few minutes.
If not, just post a discussion in the community forum and you usually get a quick response to your questions.

Overall, Concrete5 gives you everything you need from a content management system.
My advice is to forget about all the other Content Management System

That said, it has so many good points which I feel far outweigh the bad points. The ease of use and speed of implementation blew me away at first. What I would really like to see is some kind of “global block” system built into Concrete5.

I think saying WP/Joomla/Drupal add-ins are very clunky and shoddily coded is a huge generalization. I think especially Drupal fans would take offense to that.
Regarding Joomla and form editors … I always use RsForm Pro and love it. It’s very powerful yet still easy to use. Others use ArtForms, BreezingForms, or ChronoForms. The better extensions tend to come at a price, but then the same is true for C5.

Thanks for the note about aliasing blocks. It’s good that it’s possible, but it seems like a roundabout way of doing something that most people would want to do, in my opinion. It is a content management system, after all. A regular non-techie user isn’t going to know what an alias is. The option should just say “use on other pages”, or something like that.

Using the Alias option, and then posting the aliased block to the other sections of your website gives you the ability to edit that “static” block from any page that it’s visible on. You even get a warning that you are editing a block that’s visible on other pages “This is a global block. Editing it here will change all instances of this block throughout the site.”

I agree some things are not easily “obvious” when working with C5, but overall I like the front-end, and it seems like the code is pretty easy to learn as well.

WordPress is still the mature one of the pack especially since 3.0 and the customizable menus.

Works like so: Customer specifies on the Order form (c5 Form block) what imagery they want, add in contact and shipping info, and then submit form. Site owner uses the info from that submitted form to create an invoice using PayPal, which then gets emailed to customer for payment.

It is not an ‘immediate’ solution for the site customer (though it can be surprisingly quick), but it is very cheap (per my clients request), and allows the owner of the site to interact with her clientele at the time of sale, which she puts to her advantage building the relationship while creating a marketing base for future use.

I used Drupal for several years to create sites for clients, and your article is pretty much spot-on; Drupal is an amazingly powerful framework, but to get it to a point where Joe or Jane Sixpack can log in and easily edit their site requires a lot of tweaking and adding-on, things which make for much more work on the developer side of things, keeping all the modules up to date, checking things after every module or base code update, etc… c5 is just much, much simpler to install/set up so that non-developers will be able to take control of their site and content.

BTW, I do know you can add forms etc easily … I thought I had updated the article to reflect that, or maybe I added it as a comment.

Our experience with addons has been excellent – great support, usually within hours (not even 48 hrs!), with a VERY friendly community.

Quite simply: Concrete5 is AMAZING and blows the **crap** out of the other ‘legacy’ CMS’s. It will be my CMS of choice from now on.

Oh and to the original author of this article: You CAN add forms, with file uploading, surveys, etc. easily. And it takes literally 30 seconds to do it…C5 comes with a bunch of builtin blocks for exactly that purpose. Couldn’t be simpler…

Thanks.

The code can go anywhere in the page … doesn’t have to be in the head. I use it to show certain menus on certain sections. Of course, with Joomla 1.6 this will be useless, since there are no sections in 1.6, only categories.

Assuming your server supports Joomla (view exact technical requirements here), you would then need to edit htaccess to make index.htm the default page, with index.php being secondary. This allows you to develop the Joomla site at /index.php while the general public continues to see the old site at index.htm. This is achieved by adding this line to .htaccess:

DirectoryIndex index.htm index.php

Now you can create the needed pages in Joomla, and then visit each page of the old site, copy the text + images, and paste into the article editor in Joomla. Do not delete any images or image folders from your site; we are reusing the existing HTML code from your site, which will point to the old locations of images, for example http://www.stgabrielsbasingstoke.org.uk/St-Gabriels-Church-animatio1.gif. Using this method you can re-create the pages within Joomla. For each page, add a menu item (Article > Article Layout), in the Main Menu.

Finally, there will need to be a template. This can be a commercial (but customized) one, or a custom one.
We can help you with any or all of this. I will send you an email so we can talk more about this.

Thanks in advance.

@guser, I’d like to hear your thoughts about what is lacking from the ORM of c5. Feel free to be detailed.

thanks all, and thanks c5 team for what looks like a very promising CMS.

Stan, could you please let us know which quotation mark you used to make this script worked?

Cheers!

When developing a website can I use Concrete5 CMS on top of Yii Framework? Or should I just pick whether I’m gonna go with CMS or a PHP Framework for my project.

Thanks! I would really appreciate if someone could shed a light on me regarding my confusion HAHAHA ^^

Tony :

nice post. in regards to the form thing, it’s actually pretty simple to add a form to a page, with a file upload:
1) put a page in edit mode
2) click the area that you want to add the form to (such as “Add to main”)
3) click “add block”, and select “Form” (comes installed by default)
4) type a question, select an Answer Type of “file upload”, and click “Add Question”
5) then click the “Add” button to add the form to the page.
those “widgets” are more for developers who are hardcoding their own custom forms. something could probably be added to the documentation to clarify this.

You are right, but what does it happen, when you try toadd a custom form ? For example, you want to remove the question , or create a cutomized look for each template? I didn’t find any docs about it , and I try for an hours to create a n external form.

If you have the imagination you can beat all the other CMS’s with C5. E-commerce in C5 is a great and powerful addition makes using PayPal fun.

I myself have 4 ways to ad forms using Ajax and the old school method. So I have ditched Joomla! 1.5 and WordPress.