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.
N/A
Kapost
Score 7.1 out of 10
N/A
Upland Kapost helps you create and distribute meaningful content to support the buyer journey for B2B companies.
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.
Kapost has potential to be a great asset in small and large orgs. If you're not producing a great deal of content, or coordinating across a large team, there's still tremendous value, but it scales as your org scales because it makes it easier to coordinate and manage large teams and large content archives.
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).
Filtering: If you make the most out of your custom details and custom fields, you can gain newfound access to materials that may have long been lost in the ether. It's really easy for us, for instance, to see all of our videos at once. Or everything targeting a certain buying stage. Or you can keyword search to see everything on one topic.
Workflows: It's really nice to lay out "who sees what when" in a digital way, because everyone involved on an asset can easily see what stage things are at. You can also set deadlines to tasks, which seems a bit more firm than a casual email, because you can visually see how meeting your deadline fits within the whole timeline.
Calendars: The calendar feature is nice for us because we have a blog, so we can see when everything is (supposed) to go live. It's easy to see when I, as a copy editor, should be expecting work, so I can align my day accordingly. Way better than the old-fashioned "mental note" system.
Social media distribution needs improvement. Specifically a calendar for planned Tweets and a better way to schedule multiple shares of the same content.
System performance is somewhat slow.
Should be an easier way to make changes, like adding custom fields or publication destinations, to all content types, rather than one at a time.
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.
We are using some other systems that might have replaced Kapost, but none of them had the workflow functionality we were looking for. So, we're sticking with Kapost for now.
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.
The calendar view is a great feature and so are the custom views. It is relatively easy to see a clear view of what content the user is responsible for and then the due dates associated to it. The ability to create and update workflows for the team is easy to navigate and keeps us on track.
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.
The reputation of the product matches up to its reputation as one of the leaders in the space. I love that you can share and access content at your fingertips from anywhere. The downside is that it does not have the prettiest interface but you can get over this with its functionality.
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.
Workfront has a lot of great features, but Kapost was the right tool for what we needed at the time. With a team of our size, we had to make sure we weren't biting off more than we could chew and the project never got off the ground. We had to be thoughtful with how we rolled it out.
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.
