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Concrete5: An Easy to Use, Enterprise-Ready CMS

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PANKAJ
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Sufyan bin Uzayr, Freelance Writer, Graphic Artist and Photographer www.sufyan.co.nr

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If you are creating a website for your organization, the most probable options for the CMS would be Joomla, Drupal, or Wordpress. Of course, all three are proven performers, and are quite feature rich. So if you are looking for a lightweight, yet equally powerful CMS, you should give Concrete5 a spin! In this article, we shall be exploring Concrete5 to see how it fares as an enterprise-friendly CMS.

Applies to:

Web Developers



USP:An easy to use and secure open source CMS
Related articles:WordPress Goes Enterprise-Friendly! http://tinyurl.com/3zkrnrt

Search engine keywords: concrete5, cms, web, app, open source




Major features

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Concrete5 comes with a WYSIWYG Editor and in-context editing toolbars that make editing and managing a website fairly simple and user friendly. It comes loaded with drag and drop support, native Flash support as well as Youtube, Google Analytics and Google Maps integration. Furthermore, it is one of the fastest rising CMSes. Among other unique features, it offers native SEO in the form of clean URLs, RSS syndication and pre-formatted dynamic HTML tags.

The basics

You can download Concrete5 from www.concrete5.org. There is a one-click installer available as well, making its installation a breeze. Once you login to Concrete5, you will be presented with the sample page of the website and a toolbar on top.

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Since the USP of Concrete5 is WYSIWYG, the entire page and all its components can be edited simply by selecting them. We shall now explore the various options available in the CMS in depth:

The admin area of Concrete5 is fairly simple and it only takes a matter of minutes to get used to. The major tabs include:

Sitemap: Apart from the Sitemap, this section gives you a bird's eye view of your entire website. You can also see the major files and scripts, but you can not modify them here. For modification(s), you will need to open the Sitewide Settings page.

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File Manager: This lets you update files and directories of your Concrete5 powered website. You can upload, download and modify or remove files and directories. You can also download entire directories for backups. Also, unlike many other CMSes, Concrete5 lets you set attributes and access permissions on the fly! Once you select a file for modification, its attributes and access permissions are highlighted by default, and you can specify the new values easily.

Reports: It pertains to the data collected via forms and logs. By default, Concrete5 creates a log of daily activity (and a special log for error messages). You can update the frequency of maintaining logs as well as specify the time limit for which data from logs and forms is to be retained.



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Users and Groups: Users and groups let you manage the user accounts associated with your website. Furthermore, you can also sub-divide the user accounts into groups such as Administrators, Editors, Contributors, Subscribers, and so on. This can help you specify the privileges for each user group.

Scrapbook: Scrapbook lets you maintain a record of your notes for personal reference as well as sharing them with other users. The content you save in Scrapbook does not go public on the website (unless you install a script that makes it publicly visible). Such scrapbooks are ideal for keeping reminders and making notes while developing the website. You can also selectively provide access to users or user groups for each Scrapbook. As long as the available system memory allows, you can have unlimited number of scrapbooks.

Pages and Themes: This section lets you tweak the look and feel as well as layout of your website. You can specify themes and templates along with other appearance related settings. Concrete5 comes with 3 pre-installed themes, while more can be downloaded from the website itself.

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Add Functionality: You can install custom themes and addons or plugins (extensions) from the admin panel itself. Alternatively, you can also FTP the required files and they will automatically show up in this section.

System and Maintenance: This section provides options such as backup, cleaning cache files, updating Concrete5 and other site-wide settings.

Sitewide Settings: You can tweak the security of your website here by specifying rules for user login, comment moderation, etc. You can also setup features such as RSS feed if you are hosting a blog.

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Implementing Concrete5

With the introduction out of the way, let us take a look at implementation of Concrete5 and using it to accomplish basic tasks.

The dashboard

Once you login to the admin panel, you will see the dashboard, that gives you access to site updates and traffic stats. There is also a widget that lets you search the official documentation for help. Finally, a basic but nifty note taker widget is also available.

Adding users and user groups

You can add new users and create user groups in the Users and Groups tab. The process is simple, and you just need to specify a username, an email address and optionally upload an avatar image. In order to create groups, you need to mention the group's name and description. User privileges can be specified after a group is created. If you intend to create a temporary group, you can also set a date and time for automatic deletion of that group.

Managing appearance and layout

On the theme options page, you can see a list of all the installed themes and templates. With each theme, there are options such as 'Inspect', 'Preview', 'Customize', 'Install/Uninstall', and 'Activate'. Of these, Inspect lets you verify the integrity of the theme files (compare it to MD5checksum) while Customize allows you to modify CSS and other style sheets. Concrete5 offers many themes in the official repository, both paid and free.

The default page types (or templates) are Blog Entry, Full Width, Left Sidebar and Right Sidebar. Full Width offers a simple one column layout and is perhaps not ideal for enterprise website usage. Blog Entry page type is automatically activated for the blog section of the website. You can merge the Sidebar page types to create multiple columned pages. Special pages such as Sitemap.xml and Contact forms have their own separate types and templates.

Plus, Concrete5 makes it very easy to edit the meta data (such as HTML tag) without the use of any code. In the Attributes section, you can simply specify the text for pre-defined meta tags.

Extra addons and plugins, maintenance and tweaks

Concrete5 comes with pre-installed addons such as support for embedded SWF files, RSS feedburner as well as native support for video playback (AVI, WMV, QuickTime/MPEG4, FLV, Youtube URL). However, you can easily install additional themes and addons from the Add Functionality tab. Themes and addons can either be installed by performing a search (which queries the default repository and any custom repositories that you specify), or by uploading a ZIP file (alternatively, you can also provide the URL to the theme or addon). Uploading can be done either from the admin interface or via FTP.

Concrete5 offers automated backups that you can schedule (the file is saved on the server itself). You can also encrypt the backups if you so desire, using the System and Maintenance Tab.

Overall settings

Concrete5 is one of the few CMSes that come with inbuilt caching support for faster page loading. You can setup caching in the Sitewide Settings section. By default, basic caching should suffice for a regular enterprise website. However, for the blog section and other dynamic content, you may consider activating Full Caching. You can also tweak the admin interface and add or remove the toolbars.

Concrete5 also comes with a basic email settings management section. You can either use the Default PHP Mail() Function, or the External SMTP server (in the latter case, you'll need to provide additional settings). However, most probably, your enterprise must be having an email management solution in place and thus Concrete5's settings can be left untouched.

The security settings of Concrete5 seem sufficient for an SME's website. You can even block or whitelist users and visitors on the basis of IP addresses.

Overall, Concrete5 is a great CMS if you are looking for easy customization along with security for your website. If you wish to try it before downloading, you can visit the demo site at http://www.concrete5.org/about/trial/ And finally, you can explore additional features of Concrete5 in this video:.

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