Concrete5 Content Management | Alan Coleman

This is the first time I have developed anything running on the Concrete5 Content Management System. The work was for a client of Fanatic Design, an full service graphic design agency in Bristol.

As a CMS I didn’t really get much of a feel for full scale development with Concrete5 as most of the tasks I completed were fixes at the model-view-control level.

It’s use of MVC architecture does make Concrete5 feel like a PHP Framework to the occasional developer, especially when it’s necessary to delve into the object orientated side of things. Not that this is a bad thing it just doesn’t feel like a CMS in the WordPress or Drupal sense.

Although occupying only a tiny portion of the CMS Market share, Concrete5 does have the benefit of in content editing out of the box, and there seems to be a fair amount of add ons available. From what I gather one of the biggest let downs is the lack of themes available, but is that such a big deal? If you going to be doing anything serious you’re going to be using a custom or at least a child theme anyway.

Concrete5 is completely free, unlike WordPress which is released under the GNU General Public License Version 2.0