Concrete CMS (formerly Concrete5) is a free and open source, PHP built content management system for content on the web and also for intranets. It is optimized to support the creation of online magazines and newspapers.
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LumApps
Score 8.5 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
LumApps is an Employee Experience Platform that engages every employee with personalized communications, regardless of location, and empowers them to do their best work by connecting them with the tools, people, and information they need to get the job done. Integrations with both Microsoft and Google enables employees to share knowledge, resources, and connect with each other. The employee experience platform aligns and engages digital workplaces, and enables…
Suitable if you are part of small to large scale companies or web-houses which have PHP developers and frontend engineers with some budgets. [Also suitable if] you or your client want to build a website that requires some features or uniqueness [and needs] some customization and freedom. Additionally suitable if you want this project to be DevOps based project or if the project requires very tight security and is inside of a closed network.
Suited for- It's a great one start shop for information. If you want your data all in one place and easy to access, you cannot beat LumApps for this. It's ease of placing pages across multiple sectors, menu navigation, and org chart integration are lovely. It showcases information and files very well with easy web page design that brings it all together. With only a little bit of training many people can use the product and create content. Less Appropriate- While great at what it does it is still a place to showcase information, not house it. It's not a replacement for Microsoft or Google regarding online file storage. It does not do the storage. It just makes files easy to access if your company houses them already. This same idea applies to Active Directory, it can do a lot of great customization of roles and allow/highlight information for people if they already have great data about people. It is a challenge if the backend data profiles of a person are not already syncing from other systems.
As a dev, the Page object (coupled with page attributes, nav menus and page lists) makes structuring a website or web app a dream. The separation of page templates from page types also helps, the former being about layout while the latter is more conceptual.
As an admin, you pretty much have as much control as the developers of the site decide to give you.
The versioning system allows admins to roll changes back and work on changes before publishing them.
The permissions system is exceptionally powerful, allowing roles and/or individual users to be included or excluded from each permission.
The attributes system allows pages, files and users to be given custom properties of various types (e.g. text, image, colour).
The editing user interface is a bit wonky and occasionally glitchy.
The back-end options are not organized super well, which can make it confusing to find the right settings.
The customization options are somewhat limited without advanced CSS/dev skills, and the basic functions can be a bit challenging for some non-technical users.
Its a very solid, very consistent package that never lets you down or leaves you frustrated. It gets a 10/10 because its so much better than anything else currently available. It also gets a 10/10 because, even if not compared to others, it does not leave you wanting for features or functionality. It is an excellent piece of software that will answer almost every CMS need.
I have used it on over 30 projects in the past 3 years and it's still a pleasure to work in. Doesn't always have all the answers, no CMS does, but I still find it very easy to use from prototyping to working to final project. Also there is no problem working on a localhost then moving to a live site, like there is with WordPress. It's my go to app in my CMS quiver.
If you are a content owner, you need to learn how to use the tools and this can be time-consuming and not simple. We rely on the support of our internal LumApps team to provide support and train us on the tools. But it is fairly convenient once you know how to use it correctly.
Since it's not tied to a central server (other than for authorizing updates and assigning licenses to specific sites), it's available pretty much 100% of the time.
The site works extremely well, the front end flies, searches and form submissions are very fast indeed. The reason its a 9 not a ten? the back end can be a little slow at times, and this is unfair, because for the backend to be so amazing, it has to do a huge amount of work!
Concrete5 is open-source and has an incredibly strong, polite, and supportive community. You can get an answer to nearly anything you want to do with Concrete5 by googling for it, searching the Concrete5 discussion forums or stack overflow, or posting your question to the forum. Members are very courteous and do not look down on those with less knowledge. And answers are always quick, informative, and supportive.
Question and bug support are very helpful and quick. About the feature requests, we don’t have much visibility of the features that we suggested, or If they are going to implement some solutions or not.
Build off of an existing theme to speed up the creation of custom designed themed. Bootstrap is a good one but there are many others that are probably much simpler to build from than the Bootstrap one was. Make sure you host on a Unix/Linux server so you don't have to install PHP or MySQL separately. It's just smoother on those platforms.
WordPress at the time was riddled with security breaches in the news and while Concrete5 was smaller (and therefore a smaller attack vector), after eleven years of use, Concrete5 has only had one published incident with an add-on that resolved within hours and with excellent communication. You can talk to the CEO and the CTO (or the rest of the team). They are very engaged and you're working with a small company of people who care, not a call-center with people just waiting to go home.
Our organization selected LumApps for its customizability, integrations with the Google suite, Slack, etc., in addition to the customizable meta-data that would allow for a unique user experience for our global teams so that users in the Latin American region, for example, would no longer be inundated with content that did not apply to their region or market.
Concrete5 is the customer-facing side of our business. It's where we host the site that potential customers see before they choose to purchase and create an account with us. We are able to keep that site clean, user-friendly, and with a lot of available options for customers to interact with thanks to Concrete5
The ability to have multiple users and admins for the site means that we all members of our team can go in and create new content, fix or troubleshoot issues, and edit the site easily.
Our CRM isn't directly integrated with Concrete5, so when customers go to make a purchase with us, they have to leave our Concrete5 site.
after migration, it has reduced time for Internal Comms to create and publish content (for some content that we can import as a chart, like anniversary celebrations, we've been able to reduce the time from 4-6 hours down to about 15 minutes)
we haven't used long it enough to see ROI on other facets, but not having divisions create their own websites unbeknownst to anyone else is invaluable
