A powerful and easy to use CMS designed for users
June 30, 2015

A powerful and easy to use CMS designed for users

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

5.7

Overall Satisfaction with Concrete5

We build and support Concrete5 based websites for other companies and individuals. We have built a variety of types of websites on Concrete5, from simple four page websites to complex eCommerce websites. Concrete5 was a good choice for us because it allows clients to easily manage their website without having to contact us anytime they want to make a change. The in-page editing provided by Concrete5 makes editing websites feel very familiar and easy for clients of ours with little training required. Concrete5 allows us to reduce the amount of time we spend maintaining websites and instead focus on higher value projects.
  • 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.
  • Clients rarely require support with simple tasks such as updating pages allowing our developers to focus on higher value projects.
  • Cost reduction due to increased employee efficiency
  • Increased customer satisfaction as clients are able to have more control over their websites.
  • WordPress,dotCMS
We selected Concrete5 for the flexibility of building different types of pages and the ease of editing content directly on the page. Other CMS products such as WordPress result in a user editing a page blind until they preview it. Concrete5 also makes having multiple content areas much easier than WordPress, which in contrast only offers a main content area and a widget sidebar without making more extensive changes.
Concrete5 is a very good choice anytime you are dealing with content that you want users to be able to easily update. It may not be the best choice for a highly dynamic website but for the typical information focus business website Concrete5 is a very flexible and solid CMS choice.

Concrete CMS Feature Ratings

WYSIWYG editor
10
Code quality / cleanliness
8
Admin section
8
Page templates
10
Library of website themes
Not Rated
Mobile optimization / responsive design
10
Publishing workflow
Not Rated
Form generator
6
Content taxonomy
7
SEO support
10
Bulk management
7
Availability / breadth of extensions
7
Community / comment management
8
Internationalization / multi-language
Not Rated
Role-based user permissions
6