Concrete5 makes running a website easy. Go to any page in your
site, and a editing toolbar gives you all the controls you need to
update your website. No intimidating manuals, no complicated
administration interfaces - just point and click.
What can I build with concrete5?
- Online magazines and newspapers.
- eCommerce sites.
- Extranets and Intranets.
- Government web sites.
- Small business web sites.
- Non-profit and organization web sites.
- Community-based portals.
- Church, club and team web sites.
- Personal or family homepages.
- Marketing focused sites for a corporation.
- Any school, college or university web site.
- Many online communities.
- Anything else you can dream up!
How does concrete5 compare?
Building and running a website are two very different
challenges. Certainly, one person may wear both hats, but the process
of launching a great website is far different from running a great
website over time. concrete5 lets you do both: build and run great
websites. Most other content management systems are built for one side
of the equation or the other.
Many CMS's were designed by developers, for developers. Building and
maintaining a site with them can be pretty complex and intimidating for
someone who can't program computers. The end editing experience works,
but to make even basic content changes you're typically working with
long web forms in a "back-end." Adding new functionality is something
you'll need some technical know-how to pull off. Imagine having to call a
consultant every time you wanted to write a new Word document. How
useful is that to your business?
Conversely, there's a number of solutions that are geared for the DIY
market. Typically starting as a blog, these sites get added to and
added to over time until they fall apart. Imagine being told your
document was always going to have a cover page, a table of contents, and
an index – no matter how simple you wanted it to be. Sure it's great
you can get started quickly, but if you want to do much more than what
these systems were designed for like using a hammer to drive screws.
With concrete5, you get the best of both worlds.
Anyone can start making their own website in seconds, and the editing
experience is easy; just click on what you want to change. Developers
still get a flexible and robust framework for building sophisticated web
applications. With concrete5, however, site owners will be able to make
changes and additions on their own, for years to come.
Is it free? What does Open Source really mean? How safe is this?
Yes, concrete5 is Free and Open Source (FOSS) under the MIT software license.
This license simply protects our liability and lets you do ANYTHING you
want. We wanted everyone from a small business to a internet startup to
be able to legally use concrete5 as a fundamental part of their
business.
It will always be free. There’s no "enterprise version" of concrete5
that does everything you really need, but costs a lot of money – and
there won't be in the future either. You can count on concrete5 being
around for a long, long time as the core code is now owned by everybody.
There is a growing community and marketplace filled with add-ons, which
are not all free.
In this way the small payments made by those who need a little extra
finance the free use of core functionality by everyone. Thousands of
developers from every continent use concrete5 to make websites for their
clients every day.
source: concrete5.org
