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Smooth User Interface: Many users have praised the smooth user interface of the product, stating that it is intuitive and easy to …
Overview
What is Concrete CMS?
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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Popular Features
- Admin section (40)10.0100%
- Page templates (40)10.0100%
- Mobile optimization / responsive design (39)9.797%
- WYSIWYG editor (42)9.292%
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What is Concrete CMS?
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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What is Concrete CMS?
Concrete CMS (formerly concrete5) is an Open Source Content Management System for teams. The vendor states users can run a secure website that content contributors will love using with Concrete CMS. Concrete is a platform that grows with the user's needs.
The user experience is built around in-context editing and is designed to be as easy to use as a word processor so that users spend less time training people, and less time having to fix things.
As an open source framework the user can build complex applications as features like permissions, workflow, file management, calendar, forms, SEO and so much more are built right in. A marketplace of add-ons & themes and an active community can help quickly deliver solutions using Concrete CMS.
The vendor boasts fortune 500 companies, nonprofits, individuals and the U.S. Army as users of Concrete CMS to power critical parts of their web presence.
Concrete CMS Features
Web Content Creation Features
- Supported: WYSIWYG editor
- Supported: Code quality / cleanliness
- Supported: Content versioning
- Supported: Admin section
- Supported: Page templates
- Supported: Library of website themes
- Supported: Mobile optimization / responsive design
- Supported: Publishing workflow
- Supported: Form generator
- Supported: Content scheduling
Web Content Management Features
- Supported: Internal content search
- Supported: Content taxonomy
- Supported: SEO support
- Supported: Browser compatibility
- Supported: Bulk management
- Supported: Page caching
- Supported: Availability / breadth of extensions
- Supported: E-commerce / shopping cart extension
- Supported: Community / comment management
- Supported: Import / export
Platform & Infrastructure Features
- Supported: API
- Supported: Internationalization / multi-language
Security Features
- Supported: Role-based user permissions
- Supported: Multi-factor authentication
- Supported: User-level audit trail
- Supported: Version history
- Supported: Simple roll-back capabilities
CMS programming language or framework Features
- Supported: PHP
Concrete CMS Screenshots
Concrete CMS Videos
What problems does Concrete CMS solve?
Testimonial from a customer
Concrete CMS Technical Details
| Deployment Types | On-premise, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Windows, Linux, Mac |
| Mobile Application | No |
| Supported Countries | anywhere |
| Supported Languages | arabic, bangla, bosnian, chinese, czech, danish, dutch, english, estonian, finnish, french, german, greek, hebrew, hungarian, icelandic, indonesian, italian, japanese, korean, lithuanian, malay, persian, polish, portuguese, romanian, russian, slovak, spanish, swedish, thai, turkish, vietnamese, welsh |
Frequently Asked Questions
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.
Reviewers rate Code quality / cleanliness and Admin section and Page templates highest, with a score of 10.
The most common users of Concrete CMS are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
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Community Insights
TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!
- Pros
- Cons
Smooth User Interface: Many users have praised the smooth user interface of the product, stating that it is intuitive and easy to navigate. Several reviewers have mentioned that they appreciate the clean design and well-organized layout, which enhances their overall experience.
Reliable Performance: Numerous customers have commended the reliable performance of the product. Several reviewers have stated that it consistently meets their expectations and performs tasks efficiently without any glitches or slowdowns. Users have expressed satisfaction with its stability and responsiveness.
Versatile Features: A significant number of users have highlighted the versatility of features offered by the product. Some reviewers have mentioned that it provides a wide range of functionalities, allowing them to accomplish various tasks effectively. The availability of customizable options has also been appreciated by several customers, as it caters to individual preferences and requirements.
Confusing User Interface: Many users have expressed frustration with the confusing and difficult-to-navigate user interface of Concrete5. They find it challenging to complete tasks efficiently due to the lack of intuitive design and organization.
Slow Rendering of Admin Pages: Some users have reported experiencing slow rendering of admin pages, particularly when using older computers. This sluggish performance hampers their productivity and can be frustrating during day-to-day usage.
Limited Customization Options: Users have voiced their concerns about the limited customization options in Concrete5. They feel that these options are buried within the software, making it harder for them to personalize their websites according to their specific preferences and requirements.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
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Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use it for our public-facing website, and we use it to deliver a range of website solutions for our clients. I offer it to my clients because I know I can create easily maintainable and extensible sites for them and be confident that they can become quite self-sufficient in a short amount of time.
- create and publish user-defined database content
- easy and intuitive for site editors *and* developers
- standards compliant and highly secure
- was built from the ground up to be a versatile and robust development environment
- reinvigorate and grow the (addon) developer community
- expand and refine the documentation/education program
- grow brand awareness
March 08, 2021
Great CMS system for medium to large websites.
I currently build websites for my freelance clients using Concrete5 CMS. Concrete5 allows my clients to edit website content directly on the webpage. This enables my clients to quickly and easily update their website with little to no programming knowledge. Since is a PHP based CMS system, it also very easy to install on a clients web server.
- n webpage content editing.
- Very easy to use and understand.
- Short learning curve for Web Developers.
- PHP Based CMS system.
- Improve ability to create web page navigation
February 27, 2021
Amazing CMS, easy to use for both developers and admins
Concrete5 is used to allow the company's developers to easily create a flexible website that allows its clients to update their content with minimal fuss, and allows the developers to quickly implement new features or changes as when requested by the client. The level of control a client has over their site can be fully tailored to suit the their needs and technical skills.
- 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).
- Lack of a REST API for using as a headless CMS (although I believe this will change with the next major version).
- No built-in way that I'm aware of to integrate React and/or Vue components.
February 19, 2021
Works as expected, a bit resource intensive
I use Concrete5 to manage the website for my small publishing company. It is used across the entire company.
- It is quite extensible.
- There are many add-ons and themes.
- It makes it easy for even non-technical people to be able to update the content on the website.
- The extensions for older versions could be better marked to show if they are compatible with the current version.
- It could stand to have a bit of code optimizing to make it less resource intensive.
- It would be nice if there was a way to import content from my development server to my production server.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Effective and easy to publish and edit content. You enter the page where you want to edit content, choose edit mode and all editable content is there for you to change. Great overview with sitemap feature, you get full view of your website structure.
- Extremly flexible, you can define page-types and assign custom attributes to each.
- Gives developer full controll over display, and lets the editor plot in correct values.
- Easy to maintain, good security. No need for external plugins in order to preform advanced features.
- Best plugin is no plugin.
- Not suitable for webshops. Sure there are plugins for that such as WooCommerce on WP, but that's a poor choice. Best to go for PrestaShop or full-blood E-Commerce solution.
- No list view edit of the pages such as Joomla, would make it more effective.
I built and maintain a few websites using Concrete5, both for internal use and for clients, over a period of several years. I've used both versions 5.5/5.6 and the newer versions 5.7/5.8 - in fact, I was around for the change and helped migrate a large website from 5.6 to 5.7. Concrete5 is unusual among open-source CMS software in that it is primarily maintained by a for-profit company, which helps give the project direction and stability which other open-source projects can lack.
- Concrete5 provides a very easy interface for website owners/administrators. Adding pages and content is simple and straightforward.
- Concrete5.7+ works well on mobile devices such as phones and tablets - including admin editing tools.
- Concrete5 has a good user community and support forums, as well as paid add-ons which provide advanced functionality which other open-source CMSs can lack.
- Concrete5.6 websites have no good path to migrate to 5.7, short of manual content migration. This is a big problem and affected the user community negatively.
- Some features that were available as paid add-ons in 5.6, such as discussion forums and e-commerce shopping cart, are missing from newer versions 5.7/5.8.
- Starting to develop add-ons and customizations for Concrete5 can be challenging as 5.7/5.8 documentation is not yet complete.
September 16, 2016
Concrete5 is THE WYSIWYG CMS
We currently use it for one of our company websites. This website acts as a marketing tool for us as well as a means for us to utilize Concrete5 as part of our business. If we are to provide Concrete5 implementation services, it's good for us to run a Concrete5 website ourselves.
- Concrete5 is really good at providing a functional WYSIWYG for managing website content. It's the only CMS we tried that truly acts as such without any major issues.
- Similar to the above, in-context editing is a great feature. It allows non-developer savvy people to see exactly what they're doing.
- One click update is really handy. Don't have to download a bunch of files locally, then upload it, and then run a separate update process in order to update Concrete5.
November 11, 2015
Concrete5 - a CMS with a good past, and a better future
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
I discovered Concrete5 3 years ago. I was thoroughly disappointed with WordPress, and started to create my own CMS. Then an associate sent me a link to Concrete5.
It was all I wanted mine to be, and then some!
More recently, 5.7.came out, which has a new interface, and couldn't be easier for the end user.
The intuitive interface allows easy creation and management of pages, with help for SEO, and a wealth of plugins.
With different user roles, its easy to allow different departments to manage their own site areas.
We are a web host, and have an easy install solution for this program, but if you don't use that, the install is remarkably easy to do, with a friendly interface.
Like any online solution, it is not the best answer for every need. But it is the best answer for most needs. With an ever growing supply of themes and plugins, you should definitely look at this for your CMS solutions. Except for sites that we build needing a lot of custom coding, all of our web sites are now run on Concrete5.
It was all I wanted mine to be, and then some!
More recently, 5.7.came out, which has a new interface, and couldn't be easier for the end user.
The intuitive interface allows easy creation and management of pages, with help for SEO, and a wealth of plugins.
With different user roles, its easy to allow different departments to manage their own site areas.
We are a web host, and have an easy install solution for this program, but if you don't use that, the install is remarkably easy to do, with a friendly interface.
Like any online solution, it is not the best answer for every need. But it is the best answer for most needs. With an ever growing supply of themes and plugins, you should definitely look at this for your CMS solutions. Except for sites that we build needing a lot of custom coding, all of our web sites are now run on Concrete5.
- In-line Editing: 7 + has in-line editing, so you see your changes appear in the place they will be on the live site, in the font they will be and the size that they will be.
- File Management: Excellent file manager, allowing images to be grouped, tags added, lists of what pages use that image, so you can put the images in sets for being used together (in sliders, for instance).
- Very Human! Every contact you make with the site, the mail that comes to you is from the owner of the group. (Yes, Concrete5 is Open Source.) Very friendly, very nicely done.
- If you upgrade from pre 5.7 to 5.7, adding pages is rather tricky. Once you are familiar with it, it makes perfect sense!
- If you are using an older computer, the admin pages are very slow to render.
- In some cases, using the column tool will stop a responsive theme from being responsive. This is not the theme's issue, as we have used it many times in the same theme. Some pages stop being responsive, others do not. ("Stop being responsive" is technically incorrect, they behave improperly as they resize. This is with text-only content, and does not have images distorting them.)
- The only way to add h tags is to click on the html editor of a block, and add the the tag to the heading.
July 17, 2015
Concrete5 is the most Rock Solid CMS
Concrete5 is used for a variety of purposes to address our website needs. From college calendars, news releases, and directories on into marketing and internal support items. It's OOP based architecture makes troubleshooting AND development easy to handle. Since it is database driven, its ability to scale is excellent. The best thing about Concrete5 however is its ease-of-use with In-Context Editing abilities. It's very intuitive to use. As such, it has allowed me to take a supervisory role of the website as a whole, while empowering many editors who are experts on a given area throughout our company to post compelling content to the site, freeing me up for larger development tasks and fine-tuning. Concrete5 is the best CMS I've ever used on a large scale, empowering myself and many colleagues to easily setup, manage, grow and maintain our web presence.
- Dead simple editing. Basic training can be performed over the phone in under 30 minutes if needed.
- OOP architecture makes development and troubleshooting a logical and easy to handle.
- Ability to override the system with customizations, and ensure those customizations do not break when the system is updated. Brilliant setup to allow this.
- Speed. As with any system, it's easy for a developer or designer to bloat the system. Attention must be paid to speed costs associated with any new functionalities.
July 07, 2015
An Excellent Open Source CMS
We use Concrete5 as our main CMS for websites we build for clients. It's incredibly intuitive and easy to use for clients to self-manage their own content edits, so much so that our support post-launch of a web property is very low.
- Easy Front End Editing - Look at what you're editing instead of trying to do things in a dashboard in a WYSIWYG editor.
- Easily extendable with an MVC structure.
- Easy to design themes for.
- Concrete5 uses Bootstrap in their UI so when developing themes that may also use Bootstrap there can be conflicts using the same classes. This has been solved somewhat in 5.7, however, by use of namespacing.
- Concrete5's MVC structure is great in how easy you can override blocks. However, if you go nuts you can quickly rack up an obscene amount of stylesheet and "is" calls in the head of the document which can hurt performance.
- It's been criticized for having a rather large amount of files, which can be a problem on cheaper shared hosting, but I can't speak to that personally. We've never had a problem.
June 04, 2015
Join the Concrete5 Bandwagon
We utilize Concrete5 as a base CMS platform for both small and large scale web development projects ranging from simple informational websites to full scale solutions with custom integrations with 3rd party APIs. One of the core competencies that is so appealing about Concrete5 is the ease of use and extensibility in being able to easily incorporate custom content management tools including page attributes that can tie into more complex solutions such as blogging, search, and calendar capabilities.
- Highly flexible theme development process with minimal work.
- Great core tools for content management with content specific blocks, front-end drag and drop editing, and on the fly layout editing.
- Easily add additional blocks allowing users to intuitively add elements to any given page.
- MVC - customize existing functionality with ease
- Passionate Community
- Because Concrete5 can be so extensible, the upgrade process is not without troubleshooting. Upgrade only if you have a development server. Upgrading can also force you to complete in stages, having to upgrade to each major release before upgrading to the latest version.
- The community has not necessarily worked out coding standards, so some add-ons are not as well developed.
February 05, 2015
A great CMS, easy to program, design with, and to use!
I have used this CMS for four sites, as a freelance for a company that is very satisfied with the product. And I have used Concrete5 three more times for personal uses. This CMS is impressive.
- Usability
- Great documentation and support
- Great community
- Efficient paid modules
- File manager
- Smooth updating process
- "on site" editing
- Flexible. A user has a lot of control to change things
- The cache system has improved, but i think there is still room for improvement. The admin bar disappears from time to time if a page has been placed in cache by the browser.
- I know a new version is on its way and it has addressed some layout problems (i hope!) The column feature is great, but while it is advertised as a flexible tool, it is not. Moving things in columns can be frustrating.
- The use of jQuery is great but, sometimes, abusive. Moving blocks is a great feature, but collapsing them before moving them is not.
- Another great feature is CSS overrides. The UI has to be improved and one can easily destroy a site since these "styled overrides" sometimes disappear or are too easily deletable. So Concrete 5 is like having dynamite in our hands. And for those who smoke...
June 21, 2014
A CMS worth your while, Concrete5
Concrete5 is used when clients come to us requesting a new site built with the CMS Concrete5, or they have an existing site using Concrete5. Concrete5 is one of many CMS platforms out there, however it is in our top 3 for many reasons. A good CMS will speed up development time, and make extending a websites functionality easier, it solves the problem of reinventing the wheel for all the basic framework needed for various functions and features
- Easy to use interface. Unlike many other CMS Concrete5 has a relatively simple and intuitive interface. This makes it easier to learn to use the platform.
- Consistent way of entering content into the CMS. Everything is a block and content is placed into that block and entered into the CMS through the front end.
- Built in meta data, xml sitemap capabilities included in the core distribution, unlike other CMS where you need extensions or plugins to get these features
- Easy to use WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor window for non-coders
- Ability to revert pages to older versions
- Built in permissions
- Availability of add-ons is limited, especially when compared to Wordpress plugins.
- The number of free vs. paid (quality) add-ons is inferior to Wordpress, many paid add-ons are priced arbitrarily, if there were more competitors prices would normalize
- Drag and drop functions are not present throughout, this can be confusing for first time users. Some users may find drag and drop to be annoying.
- Validation errors in the core seem to be common, maybe not as common as Drupal, but the core should not be pushed to production with validation errors.
I've worked with Concrete5 for a number of different websites. This has included both personal as well as websites for small business clients. Use cases vary, including personal sites, marketing, an eCommerce site selling product, and for small business. Of course there are a tremendous variety of ways it can be used, and the number of add-on's in the marketplace for all sorts of additional functionality further support this, without any custom code.
- It is very intuitive right out of the box so-to-speak, so getting a basic site up can be done relatively easily.
- End users and clients also find the Admin very intuitive and easy to use, in large part due to the in context editing. Therefore, training and hand-off to clients is relatively painless. Not only that, a high percent actually will do "Content Management" . And isn't that the promise of a CMS after all?. This last point, however, is where other CMS's often fail (including the "Big 3" -Wordpress, Drupal, and Joomla)!
- The over-ride system allows an easy way to make modifications to core functionality as well as add-ons without actually hacking the core code.
- While using jquery in a custom theme isn't necessary a problem, there is potential for conflicts with the system's use of it. However, this is being addressed in the 5.7 release (coming soon), which is a major upgrade with significant improvements.
- The lack of market penetration when compared to the "Big 3" (Wordpress, Drupal, and Joomla) means there is currently far fewer themes available. However, it's a situation that is continually improving.
June 07, 2014
Concrete5 - A strong foundation for your website.
Concrete5 is being used as our Content Management System for our Corporate Website. It is being used primarily by the Marketing department but it also is being used to provide access to Product Documentation for our clients by our Customer Success department.
- Super simple interface that even non-web developers can use and get the most out of. This made the training curve extremely fast and very easy to on-board new contributors.
- Built-in version control system so if someone screws up it can be rolled back without hassle.
- Very active marketplace with very cheap plugins that meet particular business needs. We have purchased and used several modules with successful results however we do try out our new purchases on a test bed platform before deploying live to ensure compatibility and verify functionality.
- Built-in permissions for every page that is easy to manage. This ensures that prospects only see what they have access to and clients can see what they have access to, even if they are passed a direct URL.
- It can be difficult to set up on a Windows server. Not impossible mind you, just a little more difficult than your typical Unix server where most even will do automatic installs for you.
- The plugins could be vetted by the company a little better to ensure that plugins that are on the marketplace are always compatible and fulfill the promises they make.
June 06, 2014
Concrete5 - A Solid Foundation for Any Website
As a freelance web designer, I have been using Concrete5 CMS almost exclusively since 2009. I use it to build nearly all of my clients' websites, and it is easy to teach to novice computer users.
Recently, a client switched from Wordpress to Concrete5, because they felt that Wordpress was too confusing to use, and found Concrete to be much more user-friendly and easy to understand.
Recently, a client switched from Wordpress to Concrete5, because they felt that Wordpress was too confusing to use, and found Concrete to be much more user-friendly and easy to understand.
- User-friendly interface: both front-end and back-end
- Easy search engine optimization tools
- Lots of built-in features
- Innovative workflow and page archiving system
- Active and reliable community / support
- Highly flexible in way of presentation of content
- MIT-licensed - can be white labelled to match your own company
- Lacks complex features for more complex websites (eg. social networking and ecommerce)
- Customization options are a bit "buried" in the current version
- Some of the paid add-ons or themes are a bit pricey