Concrete CMS 9.5.5 is out, and it's a patch release with more in it than the version number suggests. Our October town hall also had four new add-ons, a museum website worth a look, and a forum thread about letting an AI agent do your most tedious Concrete chores.
Here's the recap for anyone who'd rather read than watch. Happy (slightly early) Halloween.
Concrete CMS 9.5.5 is here
If 9.5.4 felt a little bumpy for you, give 9.5.5 a try. We shipped a lot of security updates in 9.5.4, and some of them got tweaked in this release. One example from the fix list: a Page List set to "Everywhere" on the homepage could show no results after upgrading to 9.5.4. That's sorted now.
There are two new features. The thumbnail editor got a real upgrade, with crop controls, a live preview and better dialogs, thanks to katalysis. And you can now exclude system pages from the Remove Old Page Versions task, thanks to digitmaster.
The behavior improvements are the kind of small things that add up. Completed tasks no longer hang around looking like they're still running. The home folder is pre-selected when you upload files from blocks. The Dashboard remembers when you close the panel and keeps it closed for much longer. There's also a long list of bug fixes across the REST API, the Content Import Format and the Express blocks, plus some small security updates. The 9.5.5 release notes have the full list, and the announcement has the headlines.
As always, back up before you update. Then download 9.5.5 and tell us what you think. Expect more patch releases soon. The pace of development is picking up, not slowing down.
Thank you to everyone who helped
9.5.5 happened because a lot of you opened issues and sent pull requests on GitHub. Thank you to everyone who reported a bug, and to everyone who had a PR merged, including katalysis, digitmaster, broreece, janscarton, biplobice, darkdi and eastagiletracker.
A special shout-out goes to mlocati. We don't do this often, but the volume lately has been hard to ignore. Andrew built a little tracker to see who's going above and beyond keeping Concrete running smoothly. In the last 30 days, mlocati had 60 pull requests merged. Andrew's own count over the same stretch was 10. Thank you for all the work you do to keep Concrete humming.
We'll keep up the aggressive release schedule, and we couldn't do it without you.
New in the marketplace
Four new add-ons this month, one for accessibility and three from Robert McDowell.
Skynet Accessibility Video Subtitle comes from Skynet Technologies USA LLC, a specialist in accessibility systems. It takes the videos on your site, adds subtitles and puts them back. The add-on itself is free, but you'll need a Skynet account to use it. Their plans run from a limited free tier up through paid levels.
Date Counter is the first of Robert's three. Enter a date and time and you get an animated countdown to it, with several block templates for how it looks. It's $10.
Page List Map adds templates to the core Page List block that show your pages on a Google map. Pages are placed using attributes you add to them. It's $35.
Punch List gives you one consolidated view of what's about to happen, or should be happening, to pages across your site. That includes pages waiting on approval in a workflow and pages where scheduled publishing is about to start or end. It's $29.
Showcase: the Museum of Lucerne
This month's showcase is the website for the Museum of Lucerne in Switzerland, built on Concrete by Michael and his team at Mesch Web Consulting and Design.
The challenge was a merger. Two museums became one historical museum, and they needed a single site with ticketing built in and the information architecture to hold it all together. The homepage is a run of clean stripes, and the star is the event calendar. You can filter it (families, for example), open an event for the ages and details, and hit Reserve Now to jump into the reservation site. Everything is strongly typed, so event pages look right no matter which one you land on.
The ticketing integration is smooth, and the whole thing is fully responsive, so it works on a phone too. Go see the site in the wild, and thanks to Michael and the team at Mesch for the great work.
Fun in the forums: an MCP server for Concrete
Yes, we've mentioned the Concrete CMS MCP server thread before. It's been kicking around since late December, and it's still the hottest thread on our forums according to Discourse, so it earns another look.
To be clear, this isn't a workflow we'd recommend for everyone. We're not at the point where we'd hand an agent open access to a high-profile client's site, or even access gated behind very specific permissions. But the use case in the thread is a good one, and someday it could be ours too.
Pixel Fields was building a test site for a pageless block. They gave Claude the GitHub link and it handled most of the installation. Then they asked it to create a page for every image in the file manager, attach each image as the page thumbnail and fill a custom attribute with dummy data. The result saved about six clicks across 15 pages, plus all the time lost to micro-delays in between. Mostly it saved the tedium.
That's the sweet spot. It's a throwaway site, so nothing is at risk if the agent goes off the rails. And anyone who has had to build sample content for a theme or an add-on knows how thankless it is. You're trying to get your Page List add-on working, not click 500 times to set up thumbnails. Handing that to an agent makes sense.
If you're doing repetitive Concrete tasks, especially ones that don't touch live content, give the MCP server a look. Then post back on the GitHub project and in the forums and tell the people behind it what you think. We're happy to keep evolving the core in ways that support this and other projects like it.
See you next month
That's the October roundup. If you haven't tried Concrete in a while, spin up a demo and see how 9.5.5 feels. If you're already running it, update (after a backup, please) and let us know how it goes. Enjoy the fall, get ready for the holidays, and thanks for choosing Concrete for your content management needs.