tags

Concrete5

• A Trip to Concrete5 World Headquarters

  October 16, 2012

  A little over a week ago I headed to Oregon to meet with Franz Maruna, CEO of Concrete5 to talk about Concrete5, find out how the marketplace works and see where Concrete5 is heading.  Everyone at Concrete5 that I had a chance to meet were great to speak with and a pleasure to be around.  The corporate office is in a rejuvenated warehouse near downtown Portland on an upper level floor of the building.  Franz mentioned that they are going to be knocking down a wall this week to expand the offices and to increase their space. They currently have 12 employees plus a lot of volunteers. Franz and I sat down to lunch at a local resturant just a few blocks away from the Concrete5 building.  He said that there won't be a new release for Concrete5 in 2012 but he hopes to have a new release ready in early 2013.  Look for some added social functionality to be part of the next release, which is something I know that Pixo clients will be interested in. We talked about how Concrete5 site owners use of the marketplace some because at that time Pixo was in the process of releasing it's first Marketplace add-on, Pixo Form Templates, and we wanted to know how that whole process would work.  Pixo has created a number of add-ons in the past but this is the first add-on we've put into the Marketplace. Franz and his team came about developing Concrete5 partically by accident and partially by necessity.  The earliest version of Concrete5 was developed to run a client website that wouldn't run properly on existing open source CMS systems.  Later what was developed was used for other clients and was slowly built out.  As business got slow during the economic turn down of 2008 the team started a concerted effort on building out what has become Concrete5.  At this time Franz estimates that there are over 250,000 installations of Concrete5 with that number rapidly increasing.  A number of Enterprise level sites are also now using Concrete5. A big thanks to Franz for the time to meet together!

• New Concrete5 Form Add-on to Put Form Labels in Form Fields

  October 12, 2012

  Pixo has just release a new Concrete5 form add-on that allows you to put your Concrete5 form block field labels inside the form field.  This handy add-on allows you to create forms that are more compact which is great when you don't have a lot of space in sidebars and other tight spots to have wide form elements.  This add-on also creates the form fields tableless so if you want to style the form elements using CSS it is easy to do.  Two great custom templates with this one add-on.

• New Concrete5 Form Templates Add-on; Beta Testers Wanted

  October 01, 2012

  Pixo has developed a new add-on that allows you to put the label for a text field for the Concrete5 form block inside the text field like you see below.  Often site administrators have limited space for form fields in sidebars  and other areas of a site and as a result the standard Concrete5 block doesn't work well because with the label to the left of the text field it takes up a lot of space.  With the custom templates that install with this add-on you will now be able to create forms that have the lables for text fields and text areas inside the form field.  You also get the advantage of tableless form fields that are easy to style if you want to give your form a particular look. Pixo is looking for some beta testers for this new add-on to try the two available custom templates that are available with this easy to use add-on.  All beta testers will receive a license for this add-on for free and all we ask is that you give us some feedback on the add-on. To become a beta tester please complete the form below.