The Grid

We started talking about this as The zine - a magazine made just for you but everyone pronounced it wine. I think the nod towards xeroxed zines from the 80s is appropriate. Take a windows 8 or flipboard style summary view, but give people enough control to curate their content. This should be a tool people want to tinker with.

We see using the grid layout for any number of UI challenges, so basically think of it as an alternate view layer for an improved page list block. We also want to make it so you can include 3rd party feeds in your grid. So you might include your company's facebook, twitter and youtube feeds in a community page, along with press releases youre posting to the site. Interacting with any of the tiles in the grid makes a page for it on your site so we can store whatever data is required. You should be able to post back to your grid, and have it auto-post to the same services it ingests content from. Add-ons could/should create tile layouts so they can be aggregated in this view. Grids can have automatic sorting, filtering and sizing logic - combined with curated tiles. Tiles can have conversations and events attached to them as free tools in the core.

We will use grids for the main landing page on the demo site, and for your My Account area as much as possible.

All of these are very loose creative direction:

More in the 5.7 plans...

Editing & Page Creation

Redactor

This new text editor is cross browser compatible, makes clean HTML, is bootstrappy in its styling, and generally is totally awesome. Weve already integrated it with concrete5 so successfully that we can do text editing within the page instead of an overlay to our satisfaction.

This also works easily with the page in edit mode (skipping the click to put a specific block in edit mode), effectively giving us a middle edit state were going to use for other things later.

The only challenge were looking at here is what to do with legacy issues and TinyMCE. My own sense on this one is hey, you upgrade you lose old bad stuff and get sexy new stuff so if theres a strong argument for why concrete5 needs to support both editors, Id love to hear it.

As part of integrating redactor, weve been able to include a new snippits feature that amounts to Mail Merge in MSWord. You can pull in the current date, user name, page name, etc. Were architecting this in a flexible way so a developer might integrate with other data sources in handy ways.

Check out the video from a while ago...

Page Creation

Demoing editing a page on concrete5 always feels great, prospects just get it and quickly become clients. Demoing page creation is less awesome. Explaining to someone that your whole site is a tree and you have to goto the parent of where you want this page to be first is where they start to come back to earth and realize they need to pay attention. Composer starts to solve this problem a bit, but it also solves a completely different problem of making data entry screens for CRUD type problems. Adding more options rarely makes something less overwhelming. Were going to solve this problem by breaking it along more traditional lines:

1) What is composer today will mature into something that creates the scaffolding a developer needs to create a custom entry/edit UI in the dashboard. Use this for creating interfaces for inputting strongly typed content.

2) What is Add a Sub Page today will mature into something more geared for drafting as you go. You can add content from anywhere, you start writing (with auto-save) before you have to decide what it is youre making or where youre going to want to publish it. There will be mobile and browser toolbar versions of this Create tool.

New Add Block Interface

Adding a block will be as simple as dragging its icon from the Add Block toolbar into an area at the exact point you wish it to display.

Page Types

The fact that sometimes page types exist for layout and sometimes as an object model is not great. Someone should be able to add a calendar event or a blog post, and also switch its form factor. Were going to introduce a new concept called Feature that we can use to quickly determine if a page contains certain types of data for programmatic purposes. This should let us organically push page types towards the layout solution and de-couple functionality from requiring specific page types more. Blocks and add-ons could mark pages as implementing these Features, meaning that youll never have to choose whether a page is a Calendar Event or a Product Detail page type.

Layouts

Were currently rewriting Layouts completely. The next version of Layouts will honor permissions and permissions inheritance correctly, be better integrated nto the concrete5 editing system, work correctly with area-specific developer methods, integrate better with themes, and be a bit more aware of modern style guidelines. Yes you can lock layouts and reuse them today, but it feels like a last minute feature. We want to make it easier for you to create snap to points so a site owners layout falls on common alignment lines.

Image Editor

We currently have three image editing solutions in concrete5. The avatar picker, the image sizer from composer, and the edit image from file manager. Some of them are Flash (ick). All of them suck. Were rebuilding all of these to be served by one attractive well thought out extendable image editor that the community can add filters/plugins to.

A sneak peak into the goals and vision for the next major release of concrete5.....

Thanks to our amazing community, concrete5 is thewinner of the People's Choice Award for Best Open Source CMS from CMS Critic!

CMS Critic writes, "Congratulations to everyone at Concrete5 for their awesome work. It was a hard fought battle with CMS Made Simple for first place but Concrete5 took over in the end and won this year with the most votes."

Without this type of press, we wouldn't be able to give away so much free goodness in the core. Thanks to everyone who voted for us.

Read about it at CMSCritic.com

Classes are about two hours long, and taught in a group format. We'll stop periodically during the sessions to answer your questions. Instructions for connecting to the training classes are emailed out the day before the class.

Covered Topics

• Changing Content on Your Page
• Entering and Exiting Edit Mode
• Preview vs. Publish
• Managing Page Versions
• Basic Page Properties (Paths, Descriptions, etc)
• Page Design Options (Selecting Page Types and Themes)
• Content Block vs. HTML Block
• Content Block: Best Practices
• Block Design Options
• Using Layouts
• Using Stacks
• Adding Navigation Elements to Your Site (Auto-Nav and Page List blocks)
• Creating a Basic Form (Form block)
• Sitemap: Basic Structure
• Sitemap: Moving and Copying Pages
• Sitemap: Deleting Pages
• Installing marketplace Add-ons
• Installing and Activating Themes

Need help getting started? Our Basic Editor Techniques class covers the common tasks & tools you'll encounter when editing a concrete5 site, plus best practices to make sure you do things right the first time.

Basic Editor Techniques Training Class

Wednesday, November 28, 2012

9 AM PST

Registration is now closed for this class. Watch our blog for more training opportunities!

Four years ago I wrote a somewhat inflammatory blog post titled Finally. Im proud to be an American because I did have hope in change.

Thanks to nominations from the community, concrete5 is a contender in the CMS Critic2012 Critic's Choice CMS Awards. It's super easy to vote, just go to the Critic's Choice Awards page and click the thumbs up for concrete5.

Vote Now!

CMS Critic is taking nominations for best content management system in seven categories:

• Best Open Source CMS
• Best Free CMS
• Best Budget CMS
• Best CMS for Small / Medium Sized Businesses
• Best Enterprise CMS
• Best Website Builder
• Best Social Networking Solution

Head over to their website before Ocober 16 to nominate concrete5.

CMSCritic.com CMS Awards Nomination Form

Head on over to WebDesignerDepot.com for a great article about concrete5 written by community member ChadStrat.

Chad talks aboutwhy so many developers and designers love concrete5. He writes, "Although Concrete5 is a MVC/OOP centric CMS and has ridiculous power under the hood, the front end editing is the first noticeable aspect of Concrete5: adding a page is super quick."

Creating a theme, finding add-ons in the marketplace, and getting help from the community are covered well. "If you still have questions, the Concrete5 community, albeit smaller than many CMSs, is extremely proactive in helping others," Chad writes.

If you have friends or colleagues who are considering concrete5 and want to know what makes it so great, point them to this article.

An introduction to Concrete5, at WebDesignerDepot.com