25 Concrete5 Powered Sites

C5mix has compiled a list of 25 Concrete5-powered websites, including the project I’ve been working on with Concrete5. Check it out here.

Spoke at the 3rd Mini Web Design Conference

I spoke last January 22 at the 3rd Mini Web Design Conference held at the Cosmopoint International Institute of Technology (CIIT). Went with officemates Rowel, Jorge, Rubie and Elvin.

Spoke a bit about this new CMS I have been playing with called Concrete5. Was able to give the attendees, who numbered about 40+ (not so mini after all =), an overview of what Concrete5 is all about, its features, a bit of history, and what makes it unique. Afterwards I gave a demo–converting an existing site I had to the CMS engine in less than 10 minutes (with a one minute pause as I lost my voice in the middle of my presentation). Mia Sereno, who I think is one of the organizers of the event, has a very nice visual summary of the event (which she calls sketchnotes) that is really worth checking out here.

Hopefully this will help people give more choices for tools to use on their web design projects, and I think I have been successful getting at least one convert.

Other speakers there were:

• Alfredo Palconit (http://alfredo.palconit.com and http://webdesigner.ph) – who gave an entertaining talk on his experiences with SEO and Web Design
• Regnard Raquedan (http://www.raquedan.com) – (a guy who I keep bumping into in conferences and talks, most likely because he is that rare breed of developer/designer who can articulate well his thoughts) who gave an AIM/MBA-level talk on Pricing Your Web Design Work
• Jojo Esposa (http://deafphilippines.wordpress.com) – who is an expert on accessibility with his projects who gave a talk on How to Write a Good ALT Text
• JP dela Torre (http://www.pigmata.com) – who seems like another smart and articulate guy (and entrepreneur as well) who gave an insightful talk on Overview on front-end optimization and best practices
• Eugene Alvin Villar (http://vaes9.codedgraphic.com) – who introduced us to blogging platform TextPattern

The conference finished a bit late but good thing there was free food. Went there to learn new things and hopefully get some of the attendees to join our organization.

3rd Mini Web Design Conference

For those who haven’t heard yet… This is the 3rd Mini Web Design Conference organized by the PWDO

WHAT: <form> function() & .class — 3rd Mini Web Design Conference

WHERE: 5th flr. CTTM Square Bldg, Timog cor Tomas Morato, QC. (view map)

WHEN: January 22, 2009, 7:00PM

HOW MUCH: FREE

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Who’s talking and what are they talking about

• Starting out with Concrete5 CMS — Jan Pabellon (IT Group, Inc.)
• Visual Aesthetics — Errole Gutierrez (168Media)
• SEO and Web Design — Alfredo Palconit
• How to Write a Good ALT Text — Jojo Esposa
• Overview on front-end optimization and best practices — JP Dela Torre (Pigmata Media Inc.)
• Innovation — Kevin Leversee (DesireMesh)
• surprise — Eugene Alvin Villar (CodeGraphic)

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With a little help from

• Cosmopoint Philippines — providing the venue
• Philippine Web Accessibility Group – raffling 10 copies of book “Basic Web Accessibility Guide for Filipinos”
• MunchPunch – raffling 5 munchpunch shirts
• EdsaHosting – Raffling off 1-year “EDSA 1” hosting package
• Car stickers for the first 29 registrants
• more to come

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Sign up NOW and meet us

Trying out concrete5

Im having a go at a new open source content management system called concrete5. I ported our company website from our old homegrown CMS to this new platform as the old one was getting to be a pain to manage and update.

Was pleasantly surprised at how relatively easy it was. I’ll have you know that I am not a neophyte when it comes to dynamic content management systems. I’ve practically installed and tried out most of the popular ones, and have put into production for some clients most of them. The list of platforms I have worked with include PHP-Nuke, PostNuke, WordPress, Mambo, Joomla, Alfresco, Nuxeo, Magnolia, DotNetNuke, and Drupal.

While some are standouts in terms of specific capabilities and features, none have met my personal need for something quick and simple enough to setup and migrate my old website to. None except for concrete5.

Concrete5 is unique in that the CMS flows or wraps nicely around your design. Other CMS usually force the developer to adjust to the structure and design of the application. It has really clean code, a consistent API for common functions, and neatly separates presentation from logic adopting an extensible MVC (ala Cake or Code Igniter) architecture. It has a slick and fast interface using a lot of AJAX effects (via jQuery).

Its really stable, having been around for many years, in its previous incarnation being a proprietary CMS for a web design studio. They just recently released it as open source–breaking away from most projects in that they use the really permissive MIT License (instead of the viral GPL).

Some neat features I found to be really fun:

• In-Context, WYSIWYG Editing
• Granular Access Control
• Users & Groups. Community on your site is built right in.
• Customizable Metadata for both Pages and Users.
• Extensible features such as galleries, blocks, login pages, forms, etc.

The port took about 2 days, with the rest of the content another 5 days (probably less if I did it full time). The project I am working on is now featured in concrete5′s Showcase section.

Hope to contribute back to the project some of the modifications I did such as a Suckerfish style nav, custom blocks, and possibly work on new themes.