1. Home
  2. Content Management Systems (CMS)
  3. Concrete CMS Reviews
  4. User Review of Concrete CMS
Join the Concrete5 Bandwagon
Updated June 04, 2015

Join the Concrete5 Bandwagon

Bryce Wilson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

5.4.2 - 5.6.3.1

Modules Used

  • Advanced Page List
  • eCommerce
  • Flexslider 2
  • Login
  • Login Redirect
  • Internationalization
  • Advanced Forms
  • Sortable Fancybox Gallery
  • Real-Estate

Overall Satisfaction with Concrete5

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.
  • Because theme development, layouts, and extending the content management tools is so easy, we are able to reuse our current assets so much more relying less on back-end development in order to create intuitive ways for clients to manage their website.
  • Concrete5 has become a staple tool that we showcase to clients as a solution that most other teams have not uncovered and added to their offering, adding an impressively easy to use system that clients get on board with instantly.
  • If there has been anything that has had a negative impact, it would have to be that our team took so long to get on board with CMS platforms with much larger user bases such as WordPress and capitalize on the opportunity to become an industry leader through plugin and theme development.
WordPress is more so catching up with new solutions such as Concrete5 in the drag and drop content management realm. WordPress has not yet committed to providing drag and drop editing tools. Instead you rely on the community developed tools which can be an extremely large commitment should it prove not to be the best solution within a short amount fo time, where your team may commit to another drag and drop tool leaving your clients with a tool that your no longer invested in.

In not being an MVC platform and also not developed on newer faster technologies such as the emerging nodeJS, WordPress will eventually need a major commitment towards redevelopment from the ground up.
With each project it is best to approach it with the goals in mind. Concrete5 may not be the best fit in all cases. Given that there is such a large community centered around WordPress for example with a plethora of sound plugins that can accomplish much more that most CMS solutions, it is best to dive into Concrete5, understand how your team can best utilize what Concrete5 does best, content management. From there teams can decide how much resources they can lend towards developing tools that may not exist out of the box or within the community and slowly move towards inviting into the future of Concrete5 and what is going to be one of the best CMS solutions for some time.

Using Concrete5

10 - Sales, support, PM, etc.
There is absolutely a large number of projects that Concrete5 is a perfect solution for. There are too many benefits for theme developers and clients alike, not to fall in love with the ease of Concrete5. Rather than developing in complex code that forces you to know more about php than most front-end developers care to learn, Concrete5 can be developed with a couple of simple lines of php and your HTML markup and you can hit the ground running with a full blown theme.

Concrete5 Implementation

  • Implemented in-house
Change management was a small part of the implementation and was well-handled

Using Concrete5

There are few drawbacks with Concrete5, perhaps one, being that they did not develop the platform on the latest technologies that utilize javascript as teh front-end framework for the application as apposed to PHP.

Other than that, with the power and extendability of concrete5 upgrading can cause snags.