OpenCms 8.0.1 is a maintenance release that fixes a number of issues that persisted in the initial release of OpenCms 8. Some new features have been added as well.

The sitemap and ADE configuration has been greatly simplified and improved. The properties of a page can now be modified directly in the ADE editor and a “log out” option has been added to the its menu.

In the sitemap editor there is a new option to go back to the last page viewed in the ADE editor. Moreover the sitemap editor now displays the lock status of pages and sub-pages and handles lock conflicts.

The full text search now also works on MS Office Open XML based documents (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx).

To demonstrate a possible multi language setup, German content was added to the Template III flower showcase.

OpenCms 8 is fully backward compatible to all prior 7.x versions. Templates and other OpenCms developed code from version 7.0 or 7.5 should work “out of the box” with version 8.

An easy to use update wizard is available, too.

Screenshot Gallery:

OpenCms is one of the most popular Open Source Content Management Solutions. This new version was developed by Alkacon Software GmbH with the support of the international OpenCms developer community.

About OpenCms:
Independent research has shown OpenCms to be a market leading solution amongst Open Source CMS systems. The software has been in continuous development for the last 10 years and has an active community of Open Source developers.

More than 100 international IT companies have been registered as official OpenCms Solution Provider on the OpenCms website. A steadily growing list of reference sites also shows the increasing use of OpenCms.

OpenCms is an enterprise – ready web content management solution build in Java and XML from open source components. OpenCms can easily be deployed on almost any existing IT infrastructure and provides powerful features especially suited for medium and large enterprise internet or intranet applications. OpenCms is open source software distributed under the LGPL license.

http://www.opencms.org

About Alkacon Software:
Alkacon Software GmbH is the company responsible for the development of OpenCms. Today OpenCms is a leading open source CMS solution in widespread use all over the world. Many businesses and organizations use OpenCms as a cost effective, professional alternative to expensive license products. Alkacon Software GmbH is the official maintainer and the major contributor for OpenCms.

http://www.alkacon.com

To start off with, the typical size (of this writing) of the Textpattern download is approximately half a meg. This is incredibly small for a CMS with such power and flexibility. Installation is pretty standard and there’s not much to really show there that isn’t typical to most CMS. You’ll get prompted to enter your database credentials, create a config file and enter user details.

Once complete, you’ll be taken to the login screen for the back end. Enter your credentials to log in and you’ll see the Textpattern dashboard:

Note that the CMS defaults to the Write tab. This is due to the fact that this is likely the first thing most people will want to do when logging in. A simple but smart decision by the Textpattern development team. You may also note that there are no typical post buttons for bold, italics and the like. That’s because by default, Textpattern uses textile syntax for formatting.

For those use to Wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) editors, this may be a bit of a shock. Textile is a very easy to use syntax and personally, I prefer it. You can see more about what textile syntax looks like here: Textile Syntax. Once you’ve used it, you may begin to prefer it over standard HTML.

Textpattern is all about flexibility, however, so should you prefer to use a Wysiwyg editor, you can simply install a plugin to do so.

For testing purposes and to show how the plugin installation process works, let’s go ahead and install a plugin to add a new editor to the system.

First, you would search for the appropriate plugin on the Textpattern Resources site. For this test, we’ll use the hak_tinymce plugin.

Once downloaded and extracted, you will see three files:

The plugin itself is a simple txt file. This is standard for all Textpattern plugins and, as you’ll soon see, one of the reasons why plugin installation is so easy to do for anyone. For this plugin, we need to upload the tiny_mce folder to our /textpattern directory on our web host, so we’ll go ahead and do that.

Once we’ve uploaded the tiny_mce folder, we simply open the hak_tinymce.txt file in your favorite text editor and copy the contents. Then navigate to your Admin – Plugins tab in Textpattern and you’ll see a box like this:

Simply paste the contents of the hak_tinymce.txt file in this box and click upload. You’ll be shown a plugin preview page that looks like this:

Simply scroll down and underneath the Plugin Help: section, you’ll see an Install button. Clicking on this will install the plugin. Now, as per instructions in the plugin zip file, you need to initialize the plugin. Navigate to Extensions, hak_tinymce and click the install button (Note that this process is usually not required for most plugin installs and is exclusive to this particular plugin. Most of the time, this step is not present / required at all.)

Once you click install, you’ll be given a list of options to choose from for the editor. You can either modify these settings or ignore them and click update.

Head back to Admin/Plugins and you’ll now see the plugin listed in the screen below:

To enable, simply click on the “No” under active.

Head back to Content, Write and on the left, you’ll see a new toggle:

Place a checkmark in the Article box to turn on the editor. The result:

That’s it. You now have a Wysiwyg editor.

As I mentioned during this process, the typical plugin install does not require anything to be actually uploaded, nor does it require navigating to the Extensions tab. Most of the time, you simply paste the text file contents in the plugin box and click install, then activate it and you are done.

Let’s take a look at some more pieces of the admin interface, shall we?

There are two levels of tabs available. The top level represents the main tabs, while the bottom level represents sub tabs. For example, clicking on the Content tab at the top enables the following sub tabs (Category, Write, Articles, etc):

These are all quite straight forward. Let’s take a look at the Images tab. Uploading images is simple, just select and upload. Once it’s been uploaded, you’ll be given the opportunity to crop into a thumbnail, add to a category and modify the alt text as required.

Now let’s take a look at the Presentation tab. Under here, you can modify your Sections, Pages, Forms and Styles. In the Sections tab, you have the opportunity to assign templates and styles to individual sections. For instance, the Articles section uses a different template and style sheet than the the About section (more about sections here).

As you can see, you can also determine where sections are shown and whether or not they are included in the site search. The Pages tab is next. This is where you can create and modify the templates for each page.

A very cool feature of the Pages tab is the Tag builder (shown on the left of the screenshot above). This allows you to make selections form the list on the left and it will show you which code to insert into the template to accomplish that task. This is a great feature to help you get familiar with the system.

Next are Forms.

This is one of Textpattern’s key strengths. Using forms, you can separate your code into reusable chunks (more about forms here).

On this install, for instance, I’ve created a form which contains nothing more than my Piwik analytics code from my Statistics system.

Now, I simply call the form in my Page template wherever I wish using this code:

<txp:output_form form="analytics" />

It’s as simple as that. Now, should I need to include this analytics code on multiple pages or in more than one place, I can do so with the code above. The advantage to this style of coding is that if I need to change the code for whatever reason in the future, I simply change the code in the form as opposed to having to edit each template in multiple places. Developers love this feature, for obvious reasons.

The styles tab provides an interface to edit the stylesheets or create new ones as needed.

Under the admin section, the following sub tabs exist:

Clicking on the Diagnostics tab will run a quick series of tests and provide you with either an “Al l checks passed” message, or give you some suggestions.

The Preferences tab provides you with access to the settings of the CMS.

To manage users, simply head to the Users tab.  Here, you can modify privileges and details for your users. On the Visitors log tab, you can see all of the latest visitors to your site if you have logging enabled. For the most part, it’s better to use an Analytics program such as Piwik or Google Analytics.

We’ve already seen the Plugins section, so we’ll skip over that. On the Import tab, you can choose to import content from a variety of other systems and CMS.

That, ladies and gentleman, covers pretty much the entire Admin interface for Textpattern. From a usage standpoint, there’s definitely a bit of a learning curve to get used to the way that Textpattern handles itself, but once you do, you’ll discover the true power of this system.

For me, what draws me to use it is the minimalist nature of the CMS. I love the speed of the interface (it’s lightning fast compared to other CMS such as WordPress) and I find Textile for article writing to be intuitive and produce cleaner content.

There is an active community and plenty of plugins to accomplish pretty much anything you might need. If you are looking for a system that’s powerful, fast and has plenty of options, Textpattern is a great choice. If you are a developer, it’s even better given the flexibility of the forms system. I highly recommend checking out Textpattern.

Website: Textpattern

Portaleditor
Editors responsible for maintaining the websites’ content will love the improved in-site-editing. For the first time it’s now possible to even create new pages right in the portal. This means, the editor may maintain the website using the portaleditor only – the backend is only required for more sophisticated tasks. By the improved in-site-editing support of galleries and downloads, the workflow is optimized even more.

Administration
By switching from the portal to the comprehensive backend, the editor or administrator is supported by consequently used dialogs. Those dialogs and the usage of AJAX speed up the interface-experience noticeable and at many aspects.
Working with forms is now easier than ever since mandatory fields are marked automatically by the system. The developer of a module only has to declare the mandatory fields, everything else, rendering and validation, is made by the framework transparently in the background.

In addition, the backend now supports optional “aspects” to categorize the backend into logical groups reflecting the current use case. When using those aspects, unused modules are removed from the interface reducing the complexity even more.

Navigations
Besides the classical, manual maintenance of navigation-trees and the flexibility achieved by this approach, it is now possible to generate navigations completely automatically.

Therefore the page-structure is analysed and transformed into a navigation-structure on-the-fly. Since new pages appear in the navigation immediately, the effort required to maintain the navigation is reduced to somewhere near zero.

New Modules
By popular request, Kajona 3.4.0 ships with an initial implementation of a new event-manager. The module will be extended and improved in upcoming version reflecting the feedback of the users.

Furthermore, the support of tags was introduced, providing a way to enrich records with meta-information. Those tags may be rendered in the portal as a tag-cloud or as a keyword-list.

The PDF functionality was declared as stable and added to the default set of modules.

Framework
The framework was optimized at many places, providing an even faster way of extending the framework by adding new functionality.

One of the main new features is the introduced support of prepared statements. In this context the Kajona-internal database-drivers mysql and sqlite had to be removed from the packages – by the usage of the even more modern drivers mysqli and sqlite3 there shouldn’t emerge any problems. Up from version 3.4.0 the list of officially supported databases comprises MySQL, MariaDB, SQLite and PostgreSQL.

While queries using the old schema are still fully functional, developers should migrate to prepared statements as soon as possible.

By adding new lifecyle-methods such as class_element_admin::doBeforeSaveToDb() and class_model::doAdditionalActionsOnStatusChange($strSystemid), developers are now able to react on even more events triggered by the system. The controller now resolves the actions to call transparently by reflection, a module-internal resolving and dispatching by the developer is no longer necessary.

Changes made to objects may be logged by the new changelog-mechanism. If activated, the system tracks all changes made to objects by using a separate log-table and thus provides a way to trace changes on a very granular base.

For more information or to download, visit http://kajona.de/

Jahia 6.5 offers the best of both worlds by combining the modular ease of PHP on top of the latest powerful Java frameworks. It makes it easy to build user-centric, content rich applications combining of any type of enterprise and web content. Features include:

● Jahia Studio for fine-grained template customization, and drag-and-drop website assembly using ready-made components.
● JahiaApps Forge – a community-based marketplace of ready-made templates and application modules.
● Choice of a wide variety of scripting languages, including PHP and jsp.
● HTML5 delivery of multimedia and graphical content, without the need for proprietary plugins and APIs.
● Drag-and-drop creation of blogs, wikis, forums, and data-driven charts and graphs.
● myConnections interaction from Jahia’s Interface.
● Cloud ready.
● Sustainable Open Source Business Model: the first guaranteed Enterprise contribution program in Professional Open Source.
● A unique software for both the Enterprise and the Community, with targeted license and services for paying customers.

“As a matter of full disclosure, my personal bias in choosing my Top 5 exciting features in Jahia 6.5 is geared toward those features I think can best help our development team deliver high value features for our clients and deliver solutions as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible,” said Glenn Korban, Beta Partner and Director of Technology at Oshyn Inc.

“This is a stellar version! Jahia 6.5 is a very impressive product. Please let your guys know that I’m really impressed with the job that they’ve done,” added Brian Jimerson, Technical Architect at Beta Partner Avantia, Inc.

“Jahia 6.5 makes module creation easier than ever before – more like a PHP solution such as Drupal – which is unheard of among Java platforms,” said Emmanuel Garcin, Vice President of Jahia Solutions Group. “Our new release supports the smooth delivery of data from any source, and our new Jahia Studio enables users to compose composite content applications with zero coding. Jahia 6.5 is the first iteration of a great journey ahead, together with our community, customers, and partners, to build ‘content smart’ business solutions.”

Jahia 6.5 available for immediate download

● The new Jahia 6.5 available for immediate download at http://www.jahia.com
● To see a webinar of Jahia 6.5 in action, please visit http://www.jahia.com/webinar

About Jahia
Jahia’s next-generation, open source CMS stems from a widely acknowledged vision of enterprise application convergence – web, search, document, social and portal – unified by the simplicity of web content management. Structured around Jahia Extended Content Management (xCM), the Jahia Studio IDE, Jahiapps social and collaboration capabilities and based on a powerful Composite Content Management platform, Jahia brings a unique modularity to the Java development arena. It is the tool of choice for building innovative user experiences for virtually any type of web application at a fraction of the cost of competing solutions. Founded in 2002 in Switzerland, Jahia has its North American headquarters in Washington, DC, and offices in Canada and throughout Europe. Jahia has over 350 customers in more than 20 countries across the globe. For more information, please visit www.jahia.com.

One thing to point out before we proceed, however. When it comes to Elgg, one must realize that it is similar to Drupal in a number of ways. Just as Drupal is more of a content management framework than a CMS at heart, so is Elgg. Elgg provides the foundation to build a powerful social networking based website and you, as the administrator, are responsible for deciding which modules/plugins are applied and configured. To some, Elgg can seem rather bare bones at first glance but this is intentional and the real power of the system comes from the ways it can be extended. You decide what will be added, how it will be setup and as you add the individual plugins, the system begins to take on the form of full fledged social networking CMS.

With that out of the way, let’s proceed.

Installing Elgg is as simple as downloading their latest zip file and extracting it to your web host. Once you’ve done so, you can proceed through the install.

Once you’ve entered in your database credentials, you will proceed to the next screen. Here is where things get annoying briefly.

One of the fields on the page below requires you to enter a data directory (full path to the directory where uploaded files will be stored, followed by a trailing slash). The issue with this is that it does not tell you that this data directory needs to be outside of the Elgg installation directory. It also does not tell you that it needs to be writable.

In some cases, depending on your web host, you may not be allowed to create directories outside of your public_html folder and if you are installing Elgg directly to this folder, that may be an issue. In our testing, we had to make a data directory within public_html but outside of the Elgg directory (public_html/elgg). It would be helpful if the field info was corrected to alert people of these issues as opposed to not instructing them at all as it can lead to quite a bit of frustration trying to figure things out and proceed. Once you get past this issue, things are smooth, however.

The installation process is pretty straight forward and does not require much as far as user interaction is concerned. Basically, it’s just the two pages shown above. Once you get through the installation, you are shown the default homepage (which is fairly plain jane initially).

Logging in with the admin credentials you created during the install will activate the admin capabilities. The first section in the admin interface is the Statistics panel. For more advanced statistics, there are plugins to enable both Piwik analytics and Google analytics tools.

The next tab down is the System Settings. This is exactly the same screen as was shown during installation, so we’ll skip past that for the purposes of this review. Tools administration is where you can add/remove functionality using plugins. By default, Elgg comes with quite a few plugins as part of the core experience. You can see them in the list below.

Let’s activate some and see how things change on the front end.  Once you’ve chosen the plugins you wish to use, you now have the option of editing the page on your Dashboard and adding the ones you wish to have displayed. Clicking on the Dashboard link on the top will bring you to your dashboard.

Right now as you can see below, it’s blank. Time to add some content. Clicking edit page brings us to a drag and drop interface where we can add some widgets to our dashboard.

Let’s add some widgets to some of the sections available.

Now that we’ve added some widgets, we can save and alter their settings from the dashboard.

Back on the dashboard page, the widgets are shown and ready to be configured. Once setup, they begin to show the data on the dashboard as you can see below.

You may also noticed a Tools menu along the top of the screen (the menu bar). Under this Tools menu are shortcuts to the areas for each plugin you enabled.

Writing blog posts is standard fare with an easy to use Wysiwyg editor and a familiar interface.

The wire is similar to Twitter except it’s for your Elgg system. The same character limitations (140) apply.

Overall, the plugins work as expected and do their jobs well. We didn’t encounter any oddities or weird behavior when navigating the site, everything just worked as expected which made for a pleasant overall experience.

There is no doubt that Elgg has tremendous potential from a Social Networking perspective. There are plenty of plugins to use for the system. There is even a hosted version of Elgg available on Elgg.com which allows you to bypass the entire installation process.

Modifying Elgg requires hand editing of the files from what we can tell, so you’ll need an experienced developer but for most people who are looking to start a solid social networking site, this isn’t an issue.

There are also quite a few good themes available for use from http://community.elgg.org/pg/plugins/category/themes to give you a good base to build from.

Elgg is a great system with a large community (perhaps the largest available when it comes to a social networking CMS) and is easy to customize. You can’t really ask for much more than that.

Last but not least, should you wish to do so, the team at Curverider that developer Elgg are available for hire for customizations.

Check out Elgg at Elgg.org or if you want to experience it first hand without installing, join the Elgg community which is a live install with tons of active users and a great place to get familiar with the product: http://community.elgg.org/

22 million. That’s an incredible number to achieve, but that’s not the only impressive number they’ve been able to boast about.

Screenshot taken from Joomlacode.org as of 3/24/2011 9:48AM MST

Here are some others:

• The number of extensions (essentially applications for Joomla) has grown nearly 20% in a little over 4 months.
• 2 months after the launch of Joomla 1.6, the new CMS has already been downloaded almost 1 million times
• Joomla.org reached 7.5 million visitors in February, representing a 25% growth in Web traffic over a 4 month period

Impressive stats indeed. Joomla currently powers about 2.7 % of all websites on the net and has seen huge growth since the release of 1.6.

What are you experiences with Joomla? Do you consider it the #1 choice for content management? We’d love to hear your experience and thoughts in the comments below.

PeecFW is an Open Source CMS (Content Management System), CMF (Content Management Framework) and PHP Framework
that is using PHP 5.3 + as the platform technology. PeecFW has been developed since august 2010 and has been heavily developed for a short period of time.

Check out this Youtube video to learn more and see how easy it is to install and use PeecFW:

What does PeecFW offer?

Forums, News/Blog posting, Picture gallery, static page and links, Admin panel, user system, rating systems, comment widget and more.

PeecFW is not yet another CMS system, it’s a total rewrite for the technology that came when PHP 5.3 was released. PeecFW makes great use of technologies such as namespaces, closures, XHTML, CSS3, AJAX and jQuery. Since PeecFW is a framework, PeecFW is highly extensible and fits for businesses and for simple cms / blogs. It’s architecture makes sure of: stability, modularization, easy theme modifications, taking advantage of caching features such as Memory caching, static html caching and query caching.

Easy installation: Installing PeecFW is easy, and it’s done in a few clicks. Just download the latest version, unzip / untar and bowse to the install.php file in your browser. The rest is self explanatory.

No more frustration with upgrades. PeecFW will easily upgrade, and it really comes to overwriting the files and running update.php no matter how much the database was updated the in the next version.

Feel free to check out the default installation of PeecFW at their demo page and register at their own community for support requests and more.

“With new features and capabilities such as the hierarchical design of the access control system, semantic XHTML layouts, one-click extension updates and multi-language functionality, Joomla 1.6 has evolved to become the most user-friendly and powerful tool to develop a web presence,” said Ryan Ozimek, president of Open Source Matters, a not-for-profit created to provide organization, legal, and financial support to the Joomla project. “This has been accomplished through the tireless feedback and work on 1.6 by the thousands of members of the Joomla community over the past year.”

Joomla’s ease-of-use and extensibility has made it the most popular and downloaded open source website software in the industry today (it has been downloaded more than 22 million times). It is used for everything from small personal websites to the backend management for some of the largest enterprises and highest traffic sites on the Web, including sites operated by Citibank, eBay, General Electric, Harvard University, Ikea, McDonald’s and many more.

Key Features in Joomla 1.6:

·    New Access Control System – Allows site administrators control over who can view and manage content.

·    Unlimited Depth Organizational Model – Gives site administrators and content creators user-defined category levels that allow for the creation of a category tree with as many or as few levels for organizing articles and other content as needed.

·    One-Click Extension Updates – Allows users to keep sites secure and controlled by simplifying the process of updating extensions.

·      Semantic XHTML Layouts – Provides a better baseline for content presentation.

·      Multi-language Functionality – Allows site builders to implement a multi-language site.

In addition, developers and implementers will enjoy the new ability Joomla 1.6 provides in allowing extensions to be built with granular control and permissions. This makes it easier to create more advanced, enterprise-focused applications and extensions for Joomla. Furthermore, there are numerous improvements in areas like code reuse, and considerable success in ensuring the stability of application programming interfaces via unit testing.

“The current Joomla Platform provides developers with the tools they need to rapidly build the Web of the future,” said Ron Severdia, a member of the Joomla production leadership team. “Although 1.6 is being released today, the Joomla production team is not resting on its laurels. We’re hard at work developing even more powerful Joomla features for the future, such as new search capabilities and new ways to leverage website content.”

Visit http://www.joomla.org to download Joomla 1.6 today.

About Joomla!

Joomla is the world’s most popular open source CMS (content management system). With 2.5 percent of the web running on Joomla, the software is used by individuals, small and medium-sized businesses, and large organizations worldwide to easily create and build a variety of websites and web-enabled applications. Due to its power and elegance, it can be used by the most inexperienced user to the most seasoned web developer. Since its inception in 2005, Joomla has been 100 percent community owned and operated, and its software has been downloaded more than 22 million times. For more information, visit www.joomla.org.

For those who are unaware, Drupal is a massively popular content management framework / system that was created by Dries Buytaert and has taken the open source CMS market by storm over the last few years. It’s primary strength is it’s incredibly strong user base and heavy customization capabilities.

So what’s new in Drupal 7?

A new look for starters. As you can see in the picture above, Drupal 7′s default look has been changed to something far more appealing (although we will miss Garland as the default, this is a welcome and much needed change).

Among the changes:

• Vastly improved administrative user interface thanks to the D7UX movement
• Flexible content and custom fields
• Better visual presentation and theming with Render API
• Accessibility is greatly improved
• Image support is now included
• Automated code testing
• Improved database support
• Better distribution support
• Support for the Semantic Web through RDFa markup
• Over 850 Drupal 7 contributed modules have met their #d7cx pledges.

Take a tour of Drupal 7 to see some of the exciting new changes:

Last but not least, grab your copy and get creating: http://drupal.org

First, the CMS must be able to be expanded upon, must be flexible and be used for multiple purposes.

Without further adieu, here are our recommendations for most versatile CMS (to date):

1. Drupal
   It’s not possible to speak about versatility and expandability and not include Drupal. Drupal is perhaps one of the most flexible platforms available, both in the commercial and free marketplaces.

   A large part of this is due to the fact that it really is a content management framework from the get go and can function in a myriad of manners.Some common uses of Drupal include: Intranets, Project Management Platform, Publishing Platform, External facing Website management and Social networking platform to name a few.

   Learn more: Drupal Review, Drupal Founder Interview, Drupal News
   Website: http://www.drupal.org/

2. MODx
   MODx is incredibly flexible. This is especially so with their latest release, MODx Revolution, which can be used for pretty much anything and has a number of ways with which it can be expanded.

   MODx is effectively an application framework with a CMS built on top of it. While Drupal is also known as a framework, MODx does not have as steep a learning curve (in our opinion).

   Learn more: MODx Review, MODx News
   Website: http://www.modxcms.com/

3. Plone
   Plone is based on Python and Zope and is another open source CMS that offers multiple uses. Plone offers exceptional security (and a fair learning curve if you are not familiar with the Zope management interface).

   Learn more: Plone News
   Website: http://www.plone.org

4. Concrete5
   Concrete5 has been widely adopted by a number of web development firms due to it’s flexibility and ease of use. Amongst the competition, Concrete5 is perhaps the most user friendly with inline editing, plenty of plugins to extend it’s functionality and very good support.

   Learn more: Concrete5 Review, Concrete5 Founder Interview, Concrete5 News
   Website: http://www.concrete5.org/

Obviously, everyone has their own preferences but these are our personal favorites.

Do you have a favorites that you feel we missed? Add your comments below, we’d love to hear them.

Read previous editions of CMS Critic Recommends…

One look at the interface of the Concrete 5 content management system and you’ll understand why it’s so popular.  Once logged in, administrative access to add and edit pages as well as the dashboard itself, is made simple by a top navigation bar.  The appeal of Concrete 5 is no secret.  It’s slick, intuitive, and simple.

The Installation

To install the Concrete 5 content management system, you will need to create yourself a MySQL database and the appropriate user credentials before you begin the installation itself.  Download and unzip Concrete 5’s latest software to a concrete5 directory that you create in the root of your website.  Then simply visit http://yourdomain.com/concrete5.

The latest iteration provides a welcome one page installation where you’ll need to enter your site name, email address, database information, and voila!  On my test site I chose to install the sample data as well, just to give me a look at how information could be arranged and edited.

As you can see, the default site is attractive and appears well thought out.

Edit Page

Concrete 5 took being intuitive seriously and knew page editing is the most used feature.  But how easy is this?  Simply navigate to the page you would like to change and click the Edit Page icon on the top navigation bar.  Once in the edit mode, you’ll see that Concrete 5 has more to offer than simple textual editing, rather a sophisticated system where you can tweak your content and how it’s displayed with features such as page types, advanced style sheets, viewing permissions, and even version control.  Sections are highlighted in red and offer even more advanced editing options.  It’s clear that even techies requiring more control can embrace this platform with confidence.

Add Page

When adding a page, you’re not only give the typical fields like name, alias, publication date, and description but also meta title, description, and keywords.  You can even add custom fields to your page if required.  Additionally, pages are not limited to strictly traditional content, but also functionality that is rarely offered free including slideshows, a guestbook, surveys, Google map integration, and even YouTube.

Dashboard

Lastly, the dashboard provides all things administrative, again all neatly arranged and presented in an intuitive fashion where virtually all but the most advanced administrative needs are met.  From reports to permissions to maintenance, Concrete 5 has done its job well in covering all the bases.  And, if you don’t mind shelling out a few bucks, you can extend your site to include such applications as blogs, ecommerce, rating systems, and chat functionality among others.

Pros

• Concrete 5 has a wide appeal to beginners and techies alike because it is a simple, intuitive platform that is also extensible.
• The installation process is simple once your database is created.
• All aspects of the look and feel are clean and organized.
• There are a number of free themes available once you become a member of the website.

Cons

• I’d like to see the installation take care of the database creation.  Of course, that would add more steps to the front end installation but I think users who are beginners would appreciate it.  I’ve seen more than a few get hung up and frustrated on creating a database, even when using tools like phpmyadmin or similar tool.

Overall Concrete 5 offers up a product that enables users of any skill, a level of comfort in confidently creating a website that has as little or as much functionality as the user requires.  It affords the beginner a platform where baby steps are possible while still offering advanced users the ability to extend the platform themselves with additional add-ons or tweaking the source themselves.

I think Concrete 5 has found a niche that needed filling.  I know I’m a fan.

Website: http://www.concrete5.org

About the Author:

Based in the Pacific Northwest, Michael Childress has been a system analyst and writer for 10 years.He currently writes for CMS Critic and maintains his own blog
at OutdoorBlogger.com.

The first step to setting up Typolight is to download and install the software package.

You can then unzip and upload to your web host. Once you’ve done this, simply visit http://yourdomain.com/typolight/install.php to kick off the installer.

Initially, you will be prompted to enter an install password… by default, this is “typolight”. This is the first time we’ve seen an install tool password so far, but it’s not a bad idea.

Once you enter the default one, you will be asked to select a new password.

Once you’ve selected a new password, you can proceed through the installation.

Now it’s time to enter an encryption key. Personally, this seems like a bit of overkill and it’s not very clear when/how this would be used but i’m sure it’s in the documentation somewhere. Having a focus on security is nice, but it would be better if the tool itself made it a bit more clear as to when these features would be used or at the very least, link to an article on the Typolight site that describes it’s purpose (for those that are interested).

It’s now time to enter the database information and begin populating the tables.

Once the database population process is complete, you have an option to start with a blank template (which is what you will end up with if you select nothing in the step below.. or you can select the example website in the drop down and have a starting point to work with. This is entirely up to personal preference but nice to have the option.

It is then time to create an administrator user. If you enter nothing here and have selected the example website in the previous step, it will create an admin with the info shown below. If you’d prefer to make your own account (which we suspect you would) then simply fill in your details.

Once completed, you can proceed to the back end and log in with your previously specified credentials.

This is where Typolight really shines. The back end of the system is very well organized and it’s quite easy to access the various menus. Be forewarned, however.. this CMS is definitely not for new users with no experience using content management systems (well, unless you are prepared to do quite a bit of reading first).

Pro’s

• Typolight is very powerful and within the backend, one can make very elaborate and detailed page structures, content layouts and modules that can be positioned within the system.
• The system is clean, lean and well organized and finding settings is very straight forward (for the most part)
• The installation process is simple and easy to understand.
• The extension manager allows you to browse and install extensions without leaving the back end which is a nice feature.

Con’s

• A large portion of the user base are in Europe and as such, there is a lot of non-english discussions (the english side of the forums is fairly active but not as active as the european) and as such, getting support is not as easy as it could be and it can be sometimes difficult to understand those who reply.
• While powerful, the module/page layout process can get very confusing and overwhelming quickly.. even though we’ve used this system previously, we still find we get hung up and performing tasks that otherwise should be fairly simple.
• Themes are not free and if you want one, you have to maintain the links of the designer or pay extra to remove them. (All of the themes are provided by the creators other business, iNetRobots). We found the pricing to be a bit high.

Overall, Typolight is a good system if you are a designer or have a designer who can work with you to develop a solid site. You also need to ensure you are comfortable taking the time to learn the system thoroughly before delving in.

To counter the learning curve, there are a number of books and videos available as well on the Typolight site that can help new users become more familiar with the system. They can be found here: http://www.typolight.org/books-and-videos.html

Agree? Disagree? Comments are open.