Concrete5 – ‘A Good CMS’

There are dozens of "Open Source" applications, including the popular Drupal, Joomla and WordPress. But if you have a website that needs regular updating, Concrete5 is a good one to start with.

What is a CMS?
Well CMS Stands for Content Management System (CMS) and it provides authoring and administration tools that makes it easy for users without any knowledge of web programming or markup languages to create and manage a site’s content. It uses a database (usually MySQL) or other methods to create, edit, and store HTML content in a manageable way.
Content created in the administration section of the web application (the Backend) are displayed to viewers in the normal way (we refer to it as the Frontend).

Why Choose Concrete5?
Concrete5 is a lightweight open source CMS written in PHP and driven with a MySQL database. With it, you can easily have a website up and running with Web 2.0 functionalities in literally minutes. There are no complicated instructions, it is very user-friendly and the installation is done through your favorite browser but works best using the Mozilla browser.

“Designers like it because they can create custom themes very easily, while developers like it because the php used is straightforward and uses the MVC architecture (Model–View–Controller)”. Concrete5 was chosen as SourceForge's "Project of the Month" October 2008

Features also include:

Text editor
Automatic navigations – add a page anywhere and it's updated everywhere
Preview your changes before publishing
Track versions, and compare differences between them
File manager with bulk upload and image manipulation using Picnik (Picnik integration in v5.3)
Detailed permissions – create editor groups, approve content, and see an audit trail
Drag-n-Drop content around your pages
Scrapbook lets you copy content and functionality from one part of your site to another
Integrated spellchecker
Flexible meta data & vanity URLs for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Easy Google Analytics integration
Integrated help system with commercial support options (v5.3)
Automatic add-on & theme installation
An open marketplace of add-ons
Content scheduling – write something now, and have it go live automatically later
Out of the box includes a photo slide show, YouTube integration, guestbook, Flash support, polls, surveys, search, RSS, secure file distribution, Google Maps, and a form generation tool

Many CMS's have a fairly steep learning curve before a user can build and deploy or even manage a site. Concrete5 is different.

The Concrete 5 back-end is a very clean, very straightforward interface, with categories for each component laid out in a manner that’s easy for the layman to conceptualize. As long as you’re familiar with the basics of working with a computer, you probably are capable of quickly coming up to speed as to how you can navigate the back-end

Once your site is configured (which really is the hardest part), Concrete really shines in its content management capabilities. Edit mode is set up with a control bar that extends across the top of the web page to be edited, and all your options appear up there.

However, the only drawback of Concrete5 in my opinion is that the database needs to be created manually before you install Concrete5. Apart from that I find this CMS to be the easiest to use by far.

Below are more resources on Concrete 5: