Exploring New Technology – Concrete 5
At Virtuosa we believe that in order to be innovators and trend setters we need to explore new technologies and experiment in order to offer our clients the best service. Therefore when we were deciding on a Content Management System for our own site we thought it a good time to try something new.
Concrete 5 is a powerful open-source Content Management System or CMS. It started as a commercial offering in 2003 and has been through several revisions and updates, with version 5 bringing it to open source. It has the tagline of “A CMS made for Marketing, but strong enough for Geeks!” and this truly is the case. It is a simple interface and has an in-context editing style that makes it a breeze for handover after project completion, as there is not the need for lengthy training.
The system has many features including the adding of various extensions that make it easy to embed videos, Google Maps, slide shows, RSS Feeds and social bookmarking. In addition our SEO team enjoyed the benefits of a true “SEO-friendly” CMS system that allows for the easy updates of important per-page content that will increase search traffic to your site.
Editing pages is also very straightforward. Once you’re in edit mode, all of the blocks appear with dotted borders (similar to Joomla! modules). Clicking on one gives you several options for editing the block, including dragging and dropping the block to a new position. Apart from the CMS being simple to use and manage, it also lends itself to customization from developers, allowing custom templates to personalize existing components to a client’s needs.
This platform was the perfect choice for the Virtuosa site, as it needed to be robust enough to handle custom development and customization, yet still be easy to update and manage as to allow non-technical people to update the site without relying on designers and developers.
“The only issue that I found whilst working on Concrete5 is the documentation is a little sketchy at times and this needs to be fleshed out and the API more clearly documented. Being open source and a relatively new platform, we will find that the community helps to build this though the coming months.” Grant McMullin -Designer and Developer Virtuosa.
