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Well Gang,

We're gonna go off topic a bit here, but it's my right to rant. This is the first day I have ever truly felt proud to be from the United States of America. When I was in high-school, forming my view of the world, we were in the first Iraq war which I could see even then was an Oil rush, not a moral issue. If you've read much of the philosophical rants here, you know I've got no love for authority, so I really had nothing much positive to say about my country. When I saw the stars and stripes fluttering in the wind, all I really saw was hypocrisy and a new form of corporate colonial abuse around the world. Certainly the last 8 years have been beyond embarrassing.

While 9/11 was certainly a horrible event, to have the response be a declared war on a tactic and a general closing down of the communication process is inexcusable. To let it fester for a second term was beyond depressing. I find myself in Portland, Oregon frequently only surrounded by people with a similar world view so to be part of a country that seemed to be so wholly missing the point was horrible. I wondered if our system was truly broken beyond repair. I wondered if our international reputation was broken beyond repair. I wondered if this was a place I wanted to raise my family.

Last night I became a new man. We had all heard the polls, we all had given our time and money to Barack, but still we all assumed McCain would win in some inexplicable evil way. Maybe Diebold would just hand him the vote, maybe there really were millions of closet racists as the media kept implying with the "Bradley Effect" who knew, but the seldom voiced opinion of all of my friends was "snowball's chance in hell" that a man named Barack Hussein Obama would be our President. But.. Amazingly..

He DOMINATED.. 2:1 in the electoral college!! took ALL of the battle ground states none of this waiting around for a week while the lawyers hash it out we knew while still having an after dinner drink! It was a clear and total victory and I couldn't be prouder.

I feel like we just made a stronger move in the "war on terror" with that one vote than we did in the 8 years of that cowboy dicking around. I feel like if I were to be on an international tour, I'd be PROUD to have an American Flag on my backpack because we may not be perfect (my God that's clear) but we're able to do a 180 degree switch and elect a black man with the middle name of Hussein to the most powerful job in the world. "Give us your tired, your poor" because you TRULY can make something of yourself here. This country is NOT just a good-ol-boys network and we're NOT Rome falling to chaos the best truly IS yet to come and it's going to make the WHOLE WORLD a better place.

Ya know I got truly excited about Barack almost 2 years ago now when I read a New Yorker article detailing his most enduring trait the inherent ability to be a diplomat. Take two people with completely different views on something, accept that there is no "us and them" no "good and evil", but rather help them find common ground and a new understanding about how we all can get along. Its about communication and I believe that through open communication we can solve everything and anything. Frankly, I wouldn't have chosen to give away c5 for nothing if I didn't deeply believe that. Freedom of expression is freedom.

I honestly believe Barack Obama IS empathy and communication incarnate. I don't think it's gonna be easy, and I'm sure he's gonna make us all work hard for it, but get ready for some actual thoughtful, deliberate, caring understanding and bridge building from your friends in the good old U, S of fuckin A.

PS: sorry about the last 8 years again.. uhh. mulligan?

PPS: I'd love to hear from our international friends as I know c5 is used as much out of the states as in em..
-frz

The Concrete5 community is an excellent place to go to get answers to your C5 questions.

Make sure to check out the forums for answers as well. They are all individual searchable, and can be easily monitored so you know when people respond to your posts.

We've added a lot to C5.org in the last few weeks, including bug and feature trackers, and our own forums, where you can get paid to help!

You can check them out at http://forums.concrete5.org

Well, we've been talking about our community marketplace for weeks now, and the first step is finally complete. We reorganized concrete5.org, buffed out the documentation features, added a job board, built out forums even added a bounties forum where you can get paid to help on the project.

This just the beginning of new stuff you'll be seeing on concrete5.org in the coming weeks. There will be a large theme library, a blocks and applications marketplace, and much more. Right now we need your help buffing out the content in forums and giving us any feedback you can.

Check it out!

We just got lucky enough to get another interview! CMSCritic.com is a good looking site that I had never run into before they linked to us. You should check them out.

Yeah that's right. C5 rocks so amazingly hard that SourceForge decided to make us Project of The Month after only being on their site for 3 months! We've always thought of source forge as the Rolling Stone of open source so we took some liberties with our photos

Check out the whole article here!

Yay, THANK YOU SourceForge

you gotta see it, particularly the flash demo.

be a pal and pay us to host your site

Mark Moore says:

"Thanks for letting me play with C5 at OSCON. How many people did you meet that week? YIKES!!! I switched over from Drupal to C5 within a day. I am loving it! Thanks a bunch for the demo."

Here's his bike which looks equally fast oh wait, what's that on the front? Guess we're not the only ones who love c5, that's an awfully nice lookin' machine!

thanks Mark, you rock!

Want some c5 stickers and a multi-purpose "concrete5″ screwdriver too? Just drop us a line with your address. Stick your sticker somewhere equally cool, and send us a picture.

Ever since osCon08 we've been getting this question a lot. We even got it from the Drupal volunteers who essentially asked ‘with Drupal in the world, why would you even build another CMS?' I think the answer is pretty obvious from just watching the screencast or playing with the demo on concrete5.org, but here's some thoughts I've had with people via email recently:

We are thinking of using Drupal as a basis for a new portal/application server website and became aware of Concrete5.

I would be interested in a brief chat with someone regarding your views of the pros and cons of the two applications, and about some custom work and support for our projects if we decide to base it on Concrete5.

-nolet.com

Frz:

I think c5 is better than Drupal for any number of reasons:

1) It was a successful commercial product for years, so we were paid to throw bad ideas out. Most projects that are open source from the get go have to worry as much about politics as programming. We had the leisure of being paid to make mistakes and fix them for 5 years before giving the core framework away.

2) It actually does what you'd expect out of the box. Look we don't have thousands of developers working with it yet (I think?) but what's in c5 actually works well, it all looks and behaves as one, and it's going to let you solve 90% of the problems you're likely to run into building the average website. You don't have to be an expert in which module breaks which other modules in order to get a site built.

3) It's just as flexible and stable (arguably a good deal more so but I'm not a Drupal expert and am obviously biased). I can say from my experiences and everything we've been hearing from the community it's a good deal easier and more enjoyable for the end site owner to use. That means a lot when you're waiting for a check we know.

I'm sure there are a good many more reasons why so many people and shops are taking their Drupal powered sites and rebuilding them in c5, we'd love to hear them here. Is it just the UI, or is the development environment appealing as well? Is it the page types/themes architecture or just that permissions are bundled and you don't have to deal with thousands of competing modules? Is it our massively complete and impressive developer documentation?

We know a lot of people already prefer c5, reach out and tell us what we've done right and what we still need to work on. .. oh, and what you hate about Drupal, so we don't end up making the same mistakes as this grows.