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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
(26-50 of 59)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
- 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
- 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.
February 29, 2016
Admin section is great for the non technical people who want to manage their website.
- Built on PHP so it can be hosted easily and usually pretty cheap.
- Has plenty of quick start videos to pick it up fairly quick.
- Well focused content managment system.
- Tends to render a page slowly on some host providers.
- Not an extremely flexible platform if you are looking to do a lot of customizing.
- Have had some issues migrating a fully built website a couple times with Concrete5 so it is hard move from one server to the next.
February 26, 2016
Concrete5: A Good Alternative for Non-Technical Companies
- Concrete5 has a small learning curve. Easy to set up, quick to learn and easy to use.
- Concrete5 is perfect for the non-web tech (i.e. marketing or sales person) to update or make changes on their site. Drop and drag building makes it easy for anyone with no programming skills to update their site or make changes and edits.
- Concrete5 is fast. Lightweight and quick with minimal scripting slowing everything down.
- JQuery conflicts seem to always be a potential problem.
February 26, 2016
Inherited C5 Website
- Flexibility
- Clean admin layout
- Language translation
- High learning curve
- Not as intuitive as the competition
December 23, 2015
Concrete5 Review
- Modular reusable web UI components
- MVC Approach
- Easy extendability with package system
- Certain blocks could use some more expansion, I'm mainly thinking of the form block. I wish it gave choices for how to fulfill emails other than just using what seems like the regular mail method
- Having everything bound to naming makes things hard sometimes as multiple files with the same name can be open in a project and cause confusion
November 11, 2015
Concrete5 - a CMS with a good past, and a better future
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- 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.
November 11, 2015
Keep it simple with Concrete5
- Easy to setup and maintain.
- End users can update their pages using built in forms. It's as easy as using MS Word.
- Needs a few more built in forms
- Allow end users to clear cache when updating pages
September 30, 2015
Concrete5: The basic building block of any CMS
- Fast setup on both local and remote web hosting servers, either via "one button" installs or manually
- Does not require Windows hosting or software, so it's less restrictive and allows for a larger selection of hosting environments
- A very active and supportive community both developers and users
- Uses common, open source software like PHP and MySQL
- Custom theme development much easier compared to other platforms like Joomla!, Drupal and WordPress, or can easily integrate into existing design
- Many addons are free or reasonably priced, or you can write your own custom ones
- Migration from host to host relatively painless
- Page rollback and backup functions are great features for clients
- You have to really find a web host that runs well or maybe even a dedicated/virtual server to see the best response.
- Though you can often see live demos and documentation for addons and themes, it would be great to be able to try the product to see if it's a fit for your project.
- Though its UI is one of the easiest to use for clients, there is always room for improvement. Two things come to mind, the first being the Layout block needs improvement, updating or replacing. It doesn't always behave as expected and sometimes to make changes requires you to rebuild the whole thing (especially if you use layouts within layouts). The other item is that you don't always see the correct display while you are logged in. I fought the code for days trying to figure out a formatting issue, until my client said they were seeing it differently from me, and I realized it was because they weren't logged in. I had fixed the code and never knew it! I have to say here that this might not have been an issue with C5 directly, but maybe with the theme I was using. In either case, you have to make sure that you check it both ways.
August 19, 2015
Quick Project Turn Around with Concrete5
- Customizable - The ability to add modules (some free, some paid)
- Ease of Install and setup
- Templates that can be changed out of and used in different parts of your site
- More robust form making out of the box without the need to purchase a more robust module
- More visitor analytics built into the dash board
- Subdirectories in the file manager
July 27, 2015
Concrete5 Is The Way to Go for Non-Programmers
- Very easy learning curve.
- Fast, reliable, open source.
- Lots of nice themes and add-ons.
- In page editing.
- SEO friendly.
- Non-programmers friendly.
- Can't think of any.
July 22, 2015
Best CMS is Concrete5
- From a designers point of view, Concrete5 is very easy to re-theme with your own custom web design. Any web designer with a basic understanding of HTML and CSS can re-theme a website.
- From a developers point of view, there are hundreds if not thousands of add-ons that will extend the the core functionally of your site to handle things such as full scale eCommerce inventory management, sales, transactions, customer management, fulfillment and so on. More importantly, there is a ton of documentation on the Concrete5 community site and it is very easy to develop your own custom add on if there is not one available.
- From a site editor's/owner's point of view, Concrete5 is very easy to use. If you can edit your LinkedIn profile and create a Word document then you can edit your Concrete5 website. All page edits are done on the page itself once you are logged in and in edit mode. Any custom add on or redundant task can be saved to the dashboard page for even easier access and use.
- Once area where I would like to improvement is the handling of bulk uploads to the database from the dashboard.
- I would like to see more free add-ons.
July 17, 2015
Concrete5 is the most Rock Solid CMS
- 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 09, 2015
Concrete5: Rapid development of your web presence
- Rapid production - Quickly go from static HTML and CSS to a full fledged CMS based website
- Ready made modules - With several modules already made for Concrete5 you can easily extend it's functionality and integrate it into your themes
- Ease of use - Super quick to get up and running in no time.
- It'd be nice to make use of custom PHP modules through shortcodes more straight forward. It seems the hooks are a bit contrived
July 09, 2015
Give Concrete5 a try, you won't regret it!
- The site management and content production capabilities make it easy for most users to manage their content.
- The Concrete5 system is very stable and easy to maintain - adding modules, templates and performing updates can be accomplished quickly.
- The user community is growing rapidly which provides more opportunity for enhancements and sharing.
- More detailed statistics with historical data could be provided by the system.
- It would be helpful if additional user groups, such as editors and reviews were provided on initial install.
- Even thought the Concrete5 community is growing, it's still not up to the level as some of the other WCMS communities.
July 07, 2015
An Excellent Open Source CMS
- 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.
July 07, 2015
Concrete5 - easy to use, easy to maintain
- Easy to upload and manage image and document files via the file manager. It groups images as sets to use on pages.
- Direct on the screen editing of pages. There is not a separate interface for managing pages. It is basically a WYSIWYG.
- A number of excellent simple themes.
- Numerous plugins that add a lot of functionality like forms, Google Calendar, Flash content, RSS feeds, Slideshows, etc
- The dashboard can be a bit confusing for a novice user. Naming of items could be clearer.
- Searching for themes by free or cost could be made easier, this includes plugins (blocks) as well.
June 30, 2015
A powerful and easy to use CMS designed for users
- Inline editing is very easy for users to edit pages because they can see what their changes will look like as they make them.
- Pages can support multiple areas for blocks to be added to. This makes it easy to create complex page layouts with user-provided content placed throughout while still retaining the ease of editing.
- Concrete5 is very flexible for developers to extend it to provide specific features needed on a project. Many of the core classes can easily be replaced by an application specific class to provide additional capabilities. Features that are commonly changed can typically be extended by creating a new type service without having to modify the core classes, such as authentication.
- Folders and files are named inconsistently making it easy to accidentally name something wrong. Sometimes folders and files are camel cased, sometimes separated with underscores, and use a seemingly random mix of plural and singular folder names.
- Concrete5 5.7 was largely a complete rewrite from concrete5 5.6. The documentation for 5.7 is not as complete as the documentation for 5.6. Often you need to read the the code of a class you are trying to use or find a usage of it in the core code to figure out how something works. This is slowly getting better.
- The user interface in 5.7 can be more confusing than 5.6, especially when adding pages. As a first time user it can be difficult to figure out how to add new pages. When in the interface to build a new page the location and page name fields do not show up by default and cause an error when you try to publish the page. Finding this page on your own can be difficult for a new user.
June 04, 2015
Join the Concrete5 Bandwagon
- 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.
April 08, 2015
Concrete5 or how to say "It's done" long before deadline
- The user interface for page editing is very easy to use and very intuitive. Almost no training is required.
- It's flexible enough so that you can override any part of the CMS to make it suit your needs.
- It's the easiest CMS to install or move on different servers.
- It has a good caching system making the CMS fast without any specific settings.
- Concrete5 higly depends on Jquery. It makes it hard to upgrade the javascript library since the control panel depends on it.
- When looking at the code, there are a few legacy objects that could ne renamed or changed. The Collection object for example. Its actually a Page.
- The CMS is not multilingual by default. Even though i managed to 'hack' it so, it would be nice to have it included.
February 05, 2015
A great CMS, easy to program, design with, and to use!
- 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...
December 16, 2014
Concrete5 should be in your top 3 CMS search
- In-context editing
- Able to create your own theme
- Clean user interface
- The community is quite helpful
- Some modules/Addons should be baked in IMO. Events, Designer Content as well as few others.
- Speed sometimes is an issue but I am exploring optimization on my end which could be the problem.
June 22, 2014
Concrete5: a powerful and user-friendly CMS
- A very friendly user interface based on Twitter's Bootstrap. The importance and value of having a polished, well-designed interface cannot be underestimated as it directly affects the "usability" of the system.
- A marketplace of free and paid add-ons and themes that are vetted by a Peer Review Board. Add-ons (a.k.a. plugins) are checked for compatibility before being made available in the marketplace and authors who sell add-ons have an incentive to keep their code up to date. Compared with some other systems there seems to be less chance that an add-on is going to conflict with others, or that the add-on will be abandoned.
- Security seems to be quite good. I have not even heard of a Concrete5 site getting hacked. As such, system updates are not mandatory just for security patches. This means there is potentially less upkeep to the system.
- The system was designed from the ground up to run a page-based site (as opposed to a system that was originally designed for blogging but can also now handle pages).
- Depending on the needs of the site and how the system is set up there can be multiple ways to edit content, which can be confusing if not handled well by the developer and training.
- No built-in way to migrate content from WordPress.
June 21, 2014
A CMS worth your while, Concrete5
- 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.
June 17, 2014
Concrete5: Fast, Simple and User-Friendly
- Quick to set up
- Easy to understand and use
- Great community of help, themes and add-ons
- Not the easiest to set up for blogging
- Because there's a small user-base, there may not be as much support as other systems
- Not all plugins are free