A showcase, evaluation and demo of the free open source concrete5 content management system. Presented for the Free Open Source Business Apps group on 14 Nov 2013.

1. concrete5 workshop
Russell Searle
Principal Consultant, Psicom
Melbourne Business Apps Group
Free Open SourceJoomla! User Group
27 March Nov 2013
14 2013

2. Agenda
• Overview
• Feature set
• Site builders
• Designers
• Developers
• Enterprise
• Marketplace
• Learning concrete5
• Demos
• Best bits of concrete5
• Q&A

3. Overview
• Content system focused on ease of use
• Equally pitched to site builders, designers and
developers
• Register sites with community
• Browse, purchase and install add-ons direct from
online marketplace
• Some enterprise services
• Not a mature product or ecosystem yet, but very
healthy and promising

4. Features for site builders
• Leverage content creation and authoring model
• Page-centric approach
• In-context WYSIWYG editing and page assembly
• Lego-style page assembly:
• Page types, themes, blocks, stacks, content, HTML
• Drag-and-drop, cut-and-paste, clipboard
• Informal and simple, short learning curve
• Straightforward dashboard within easy reach
• Comprehensive content authoring services

5. Features for designers
• Simple framework-agnostic theming
• Adapt an ordinary HTML theme
• Add a few lines of boilerplate PHP to the index page
• Bootstrap 3.0, YAML etc themes in marketplace
• Artisteer produces concrete5 themes
• Theme may include several page types, single
pages, attributes

6. Features for developers
• Standard MVC pattern
• Hierarchical folder structure for overrides:
• Custom objects in site root folders override core and package
objects in core / package folders
• Theme pages override site page types
• Special rules for helpers, overrides of packages and package
elements, and themes
• JQuery, Zend Framework classes, ADOdb layer
• Very good documentation and forums
• Certification options, community badges
• Good opportunity to build marketplace add-ons

7. Enterprise offering
• Extended content publishing workflow
• Internationalisation
• Site architecture and stability audit

8. Marketplace features
• Marketplace is emerging
• Some vertical business applications, but not a full range
• Most add-ons are UI widgets, content blocks, developer tools etc
• Single-site licences, one-off purchases, no subscriptions
• Vertical business apps:
• eCommerce with many plug-ins; bridges to other shopping carts
• Real estate
• Directories, ad servers
• Membership, sports clubs
• Document library, media library
• Events and bookings
• Forum, social media …

9. Learning concrete5
• Getting started videos
• Online editor’s guide
• Video training tracks for editors, designers and develo
• Online expert training classes (course fees)
• Developer reference
• How-tos and forums
• concrete5 books from Packt

10. Demos

11. Best bits of concrete5
• JavaScript front-end page assembly workspace
(major improvements coming in v5.7)
• User-friendly HTML5 content assembly
• Straightforward development of add-ons
• Very good documentation and training

12. Q&A