marketing and graphic
design agency

building websites with Concrete5

Litchfield Morris has been building content managed websites using the Joomla open source system since 2004. We have found Joomla to be a stable, flexible and comprehensive CMS and are confident we can build practically anything our clients might need for their online activities.

Jommla is a ‘full-on’ CMS with a full set of configuration options and settings, the back-end admin area where you make webpage updates can be a daunting place to be if you’re not a natural with the mouse. Most of our clients require this advanced level of website to create a rich interactive website that promotes their business. However some of our clients only require a smaller simpler website, while still giving them the ability to amend and add content.

So the search began for an easier to use CMS which would compliment our more comprehensive Joomla based offering and would enable clients to quickly update their web pages intuitively and without fuss. Anyone who has ever had the slightest interest in CMS knows that there are literally hundreds of great systems out there, we have experimented with most of the well known ones like Drupal, Typo, e107 and SilverStripe but haven't found anything that in our opinion betters Joomla for its mix of functionality and relative ease of use.

Enter Concrete5. Over the past year or so Concrete5 has caused quite a lot of chatter on the forums with bold claims by its developers about its amazing ease of use and powerful simplicity. Having now built two sites with it, we tend to agree.

Concrete5 started life as a paid-for commercial offering but made the jump to open source in 2008, a move which can only help to accelerate its popularity. The Concrete developers claim that it matches Drupal and Joomla for functionality but unlike these systems isn't aimed at the professional developer but for the average person who isn't a PHP coding professional by night!

Concrete5’s greatest strength lies with it’s streamlined and intuitive ‘in-line’ editing workflow. This means that website content is updated by simply browsing to your page, putting that page in edit mode and clicking on the text or images you want to update. You make your changes and save the page - that’s it. It even stores all the old versions of that page so should you make a complete mess of it you can always go back to the version before the problem occurred. Now Joomla has a version of in-line front-end editing as well but it’s not as slick as the the Concrete5 method. Similarly new pages can be created and automatically added to the navigation menu from the front-end. There is a back-end admin area called the dashboard where fundamental site configuration and maintenance happens as well a site map of your entire website hierarchy. This site map can be used to amend meta information, move or copy pages by simple drag and drop and change other key page properties like permissions etc.

Content is added to pages by inserting ‘blocks’ into areas which are pre defined when the theme template is designed and coded. The blocks come in different types, basic ones to handle text, images, raw HTML, forms or navigation/page lists and a more custom variety such as Google maps, slide shows, Flash content, video, guest books etc. Recently a simple e-commerce component was released by the Concrete5 team as a paid-for add-on, like other aspects of the Concrete5 system it’s apparent simplicity belies a surprising amount of powerful features.

A bonus for cost effective website development from our point of view is that it’s an extremely rapid process to design and construct bespoke themes for Concrete5. There are built-in options for page types with or without left and right side columns - these are selected when a new page is created to fit the specific need of the pages content.

This flexibility is inherent thought Concreter5, content blocks can be added ad hoc to pages where required or can be positioned on the specific page types to always appear by default - this is a really nice feature. Although it did cause us some problems when we needed to update blocks on multiple pages without realizing that a global scrapbook function is used to make changes to blocks throughout the site in one go. You basically add blocks to the global scrapbook (don’t get this confused with the personal scrapbook which is not global) and every time you need that particular block pull it from the global scrapbook which creates an instance of the block on the page. Changes made to the block in the global scrapbook are propagated throughout the site - so all the instances are updated too.

Certainly a very large and more complex website would benefit from the structured but highly automated systems of Joomla and the availability of a vast amount of components and modules make Joomla our first choice CMS for our clients web projects. But Concrete5 had earned a place in our tool box and we look forward to offering our clients the next-generation benefits of this remarkable CMS.

Do you require a smaller, simpler website, but still wish to manage it yourself? Then Concrete5 could be for you. Contact us to discuss your requirements.