An Excellent Open Source CMS
July 07, 2015
An Excellent Open Source CMS
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
5.6 and 5.7
Overall Satisfaction with Concrete5
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.
- Fast turn-around of custom website projects.
- Quick live prototyping of content because it's so easy to fill out pages and control versions of pages.
- Training and support are very low.
- WordPress,Joomla!,Drupal,SquareSpace
The front end editing is really what sets Concrete5 apart. While others have extended front-end editing capabilities to other CMS setups with plugins / modules, it's native to Concrete5 and a big part of their game plan. In 5.7 this has really been taken to another level. It's very clean and fast to build out pages with blocks.