So Why Concrete5?

With all the great and longstanding CMS's out there on the interwebs, what sets Concrete5 apart from the rest, and why convince my clients to use it?

You might say that I am biased, since admittedly 95% of my income is related to C5, but there are a host of reasons why that is, and I'd like to do my best to convincingly convey those to you.

Research

Firstly, a bit about me.  I have not always been a developer full time.  My larger background is in working with mid to large size churches.  Churches, in fact, are one of the most media intensive, content driven web sites today.  Their primary objective in every way, is to connect users (congregants) to media, text, messages, blogs, events, special events, and then there is people management.  Churches have an intensive need for people connectivity.  Small groups, special interest groups, student ministries,  and child care to name just a few.

It's because of this massively overwhelming task of internet integration in the early 2000's that I was led to the likes of Joomla!, and Drupal, and even Zoops.

The concept of a "Content Management System" had always made sense from the standpoint of allowing the children's minister to manage his content for his team, and have private areas, and then the same be true for the young adults team, and the adults team, special studies groups.....blah blah blah.

Meeting all these needs was nothing short of a monumental task.

I'm not going to waste time "comparing", but instead, I'm going to outline why Concrete5 is able to meet all of these intricacies and then some. Which in my mind, makes it more than capable for ANY application.

In-context editing

While this is growing in popularity among all CMS's, C5 has had this down for years.  From a client standpoint, it can not get any easier than this.

Step one, go to page.  Step two, put the page in edit mode, step three, add/edit/move/delete stuff.  done.

It's not just that C5 does this, it's that it's thought out in whole.  The entire content building experience is drag and drop, click and add, SEE your content as you build it.  Clients simply LOVE this.

Versioning - built right in

Every client I have known has an amazing gift to break things on a website.  It's like some sort of unspoken "law of web".  But thanks to C5's versioning that is baked right in, you can roll back any page, at any time, to undo the OOPS.

User Permissions

The advanced permissions in C5 is incredible.  You can restrict permissions right down to the block level.  So granting any array of ministry team leaders specific permissions is so easy and quick...again, clients latch on to this concept, and the process of doing it extremely quick.

Composer Tool

I can't say enough about this tool.  if you are a design house, this item alone should make you leap for joy!  In sum - the ability to have one area on your site with as many "content types" as you want.  So as a web shop, you can set up a news content type, an events content type....anything.  and then send your client to one place on the site.  stupid easy. None of this "go here to do this, unless this - then go here to do that and that.  But mostly go here to do this" .  Instead, it's simply, go here.  it's truly great.

Client Friendly

If you have ever tried to train a client in how to manage Joomla...then you intimately know the pain involved, in what we will call "client memory retention".   Concrete5 has an enormous advantage over any other CMS or Blogging platform in this regard.  Clients "get" it.  Not to mention the fact that C5 has many approaches to the same concept baked right in!  In context, dashboard editing, page defaults...you name it, it has it all. And because of this, it will fit with pretty much any clients mode of thinking.

Addons

Even though most other CMS's have addons as well, and for that mater, most of them free - Concrete5's approach to SUPORTED addons is full of win.  I know personally, every product I make I work tirelessly to support that product and improve it.  The idea of getting personalized support, perpetually improving products & new releases, for $40 is incredible.  To drop $125 in addons on a $3200 project to save you roughly 60-80 hours of programming and debug time is priceless.  AND you get personalized support.  Hard to find that in ANY business, let alone the "free-ware" CMS world.  You can only expect so much for free. but with paid addons, you get support and implementation help that is hard to pass up!