Many people look at web applications as magic. WOW!! That site can do that? How can I get a web site to do all that stuff and wait a minute, its easy to modify the text or a graphic? I don’t need to know HTML or any of that techie stuff?

Web Designers, Web Developers and everyone else will love this new wave of maintaining your new web sites (or your site re-designs). Using this newly released Open Source Content Management System called Concrete 5, you can easily have a web site up and running with Web 2.0 functionalities in literally minutes. There are no funky complicated rules or ways to do things. The installation is done through your favorite browser but works best using Gecko or Mozilla browsers. Designers like it because they can create custom themes very easily. Developers like it because the php used is straight forward and uses the MVC architecture.

Let’s start this review on why I think it is an important addition to the Content Management System arena. Why not just use Drupal or Joomla? A couple of reasons. 1. Drupal and Joomla are really well developed and community supported. Nothing wrong with that, but both of these CMS’s have become bloated. (Lots of code and it is heavy) 2. Support from the core team is nominal. Granted the support forums and documents are far more developed than Concrete 5 is at the moment but that is improving. 3. A plethora of add-ons that are not completely checked to ensure it runs well with current versions of software. 4. Some add-ons for Drupal and Joomla are tedious and you have to understand the back-end administrative area just to install it and then, in some cases, configure it. Now with those reasons stated, web savvy developers and designers normally have very little problem doing these things but a site owner (from my observation) has a very hard time with it. They even have a much more difficult time of just modifying a page, adding a new page or updating information that takes a designer a few minutes (and the money to have them do it) where as most site owners would prefer to do it themselves. Document management is not as easy as they say. Changing images are not easy either.

(I must say this. Before judging this system (if you have problems), you must must must, take a look at the tutorials and help section of Concrete 5. The forums also answer many questions new users have. I will be the first to say that searching the documents and forum can sometimes be frustrating but most of the answers are there if you take the time to look. This holds true with any system, including Drupal and Joomla. I would say the number one asked question about installation problems is actually caused by the hosting platform. The system is not integrally made for a MS server, it is designed out of the box to be run on a Linux server. So please, review the available videos and documents on the Concrete 5 site before saying you can’t do something.)