Heard about Concrete5 in a podcast from twit.tv called Floss Weekly [ FLOSS Weekly 239 ]. Am currently using Podax on Android to retrieve and listen to my podcasts and gPodder on my desktop to manage the shows I want. That's a hole other topic though so let's get back to how awesome Concrete5 is, and how they have successfully utilized Open Source and Creative Commons as the basis for their business model.
Concrete5 is a content management system that is free and open source, made for marketing but built for geeks. Concrete5 was designed for ease of use, for users with minimum technical skill can still make beautiful pages. It enables users to edit site content directly from the page. It provides version management for every page, similar to wiki software, so any edits can be viewed and reverted back to, also allows users to edit images through an embedded editor on the page.
Watch this introduction to concrete5 from the core team to see what it is about.
In this short 2 minute clip the concrete5 team shows just how easy it it to use. As seen in their URL bar they are running the server on their local machine, but rest assured it is pretty fast in the real world as well.
As seen in the video above concrete5 is an easy to use content management system that is friendly for designers, developers, and writers. From the start of the project the developers wanted to create something that was in middle between Wordpress and Django in terms of user-friendliness and being able to grow to large scales.
The Community
One of the most important things about concrete5 and most Open Source projects is the community, and concrete5 has a good community setup which has helped with it's adoption and business model. Users are encouraged to help the project in any way possible, such as promoting concrete5 in a blog post (like this one), helping the community, or even development work. After doing so you can submit a request for karma.Karma
Every karma point earned during a peroid of a week will count as a single ticket to a raffle, where some randomly picked winners will get free add-ons. "Raffle... add-on's?" Your thinking... "that doesn't sound that good." Well I'd beg to differ, while there are some good free add-ons and themes, sometimes a paid add-on will be necessary or at least save lots of time, and if they can be attained by helping others, well that's just awesome. Not only that but as a freelancer having won a couple of those add-ons give us a chance to use some of those add-ons that are costly and have a better sales pitch to potential clients.The Marketplace
The marketplace draws it all together really well. After creating an account at concrete5.org you can manage all of your concrete5 installs, as well as user permissions and licenses. What was really nice was piling a bunch of free add-ons and themes to the cart, then when done the cart didn't ask for any private information and presented me with a dropdown box to select which one of my sites running concrete5 to send the packages too.
See how to connect your concrete5 site to the community so you can easily install add-ons and themes.
"We think people need to communicate better.
Deep down, we all have the same goals and dreams. The world would be a better place if everyone stopped worrying about "evil" and just started workin' it out together.
The web can help with that.
The web could be the most inexpensive and flexible communication system out there. It could be universally owned and used, and it could bring the barrier of entry down to zero for everyone.
So far it hasn't. It still takes a lot of money and technical skills to build and run a good looking website. We want to end that.
concrete5 makes it easy for anyone to build and manage a website."
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