Item: Concrete CMS
Rating: 7
Author: Justin Reock

Overall Satisfaction with Concrete5

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I used Concrete5 to help several non-technical people design and publish web-based portals for their business.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Providing a WYSIWYG interface for deploying enterprise-ready web portals for marketing and social media.
Allowing non-technical designers to produce web technology using standard frameworks.
Creating social media portals with role based authentication with very little effort.

Cons

Better templating and cross-browser uniformity.
A more cohesive framework for writing plugins.
Expansion of the Concrete5 widget marketplace.

Return on Investment

Faster deployment
Very low learning curve
Non-developers can work on this without an IT staff, if the hosting is managed well.

While more mature CMS technologies like Drupal and Joomla offer a more expanded function set, Concrete5 represents by far the lowest learning curve that I've seen in CMS, so it's great for the end user or non-technical designer, and more approachable than these other CMS technologies.

Likelihood to Renew

It's very quick to stand up, supported by most hosting platforms, and easy and approachable to non-technical designers.

Likelihood to Recommend

Concrete5 is suited for media and content-driven websites, and integrating those sites easily with social media. I would not use this product for, say, CRM or an Enterprise support application, it's not a replacement for J2EE and those sorts of technologies. Persistence is managed within the Concrete5 framework, so, rendering tables off an external database, for instance, is something you'd have to customize on your own.

Comments

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Great CMS for Savvy Developers and Novices Alike