Get our Latest Finds
Subscribe to our RSS feed or enter your email address below to get the feed delivered to you by email:
Follow Gizmo
Using this Site
Top Rated
Gizmo's Freeware is Recruiting
We are currently looking for people with skills and/or interest in the following areas:
- Anonymous Surfing Service
- Mobile Apps contributors
- Mac Section contributors
If this sounds like you then click here for more details
A Great Collection of Web Site Creation Resources [Updated]
As you might expect, everything you need is available for free online. If you want to know where, read on.
First, I’ll assume that you’ve already rented some space on a web server somewhere, and you have the necessary ftp username and password to allow you to upload files. If you don’t have any server space, however, check out www.defeatingthehacker.com/securitysavvy/ubuntu_server_howto.htm. This is a document I wrote which explains how to turn an old PC into a Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP web server. It’s a year or 2 old now, but the advice still holds.
Next, you’ll want a Content Management System to install on your server. At this point you’ll probably be expecting me to help you decide between Joomla, Drupal and WordPress. And you’d be wrong. For relatively simple sites, you can’t beat a newcomer called Concrete5, which you can download from http://www.concrete5.org/. Turning a basic HTML template into a page that you can edit via Concrete5 is astonishingly simple, as can be seen from the video at http://www.concrete5.org/index.php?cID=2878.
Finally, you’ll want a ready-made HTML template, ie a design for your site that you can incorporate into Concrete5 and perhaps modify. There are lots of web sites that offer free CSS-based templates. Among my favourites are www.opendesigns.org, www.oswd.org and www.getfreewebdesigns.com.
Got an idea for a Hot Find? Fill in the form at http://www.techsupportalert.com/content/submit-product-review.htm and tell the world!
- Article type:
Printer-friendly version
Comments
Hi,
Thanks for the great review! It's nice to see concrete5 mentioned by you in that company.
I have to point out to your posters, concrete5 is actually quite "enterprise worthy." There is an advanced permission system you can turn on which gives you user/group specific rights down to each element on the page. No, there is no workflow building tool available today. But yes, you can serve an enterprises needs as well with a little configuration. We've done work with concrete5 for organizations including Clear Wireless, The National Guard, and any number of universities. concrete5 is certainly not Team Site in it's inception, but just because it isn't painful to use doesn't mean it can't do a lot.
The promise of our marketplace, that you will always get add-ons that work with support and updates behind them, means that by necessity our project is run differently than many open source ones. We manage our core subversion trunk quite tightly, and there's a community driven review process behind any submission to our marketplace. If that makes us hard to work with, so be it - it also makes it so my mom could setup a website with our software.
Great post, thanks for the link.
-Franz Maruna
CEO, concrete CMS
http://concrete5.org
There is, as you say, a huge difference between "enterprise level" CMSes and the consumer ones. Many people assume that Drupal, WordPress, Joomla, Concrete5 etc are as good as it gets, and that all CMSes are open source. Nothing could be further from the truth. At the enterprise level, the access control features are much more sophisticated, and there are features such as workflow (Fred can create or edit a page, but Jim has to approve it before it is available for public viewing).
There are very few cheap, free, or open source enterprise-level CMSes (trust me on this. I recently spent 6 months evaluating them for a client). Alfresco is interesting, though, as is Mysource Matrix.
Nice suggestions. Concrete5 is terribly interesting, and I've had my eye on it since its inception. It's actually capable of working with more than just simple sites... though, admittedly, it's not a full-blown, fully-featured, deadly-serious CMS... yet. I'm also a little irritated by how certain things on the Concrete5 web site have become commercial, where they started out free. And I've found the Concrete5 people can sometimes (and I stress the word "sometimes," because it doesn't always happen) be a little difficult to work with.
All that said, Concrete5 really is amazing to work with... very different from almost anything else out there. Well worth a look.
Another player in the realm of that particular CMS type is ZIMPLIT, which can be used with the Zimplit control script residing either on Zimplit's server, or on one's own server after downloading the Zimplit script. Most Ziplit users just use the script that's on Zimplit's server; and if one downloads the script and uses it on one's own server, it can actually be a tad bit tricky to get it to work just right because of the unintuitive changes to the script which must be made. However, once it's done and working, it's quite nice. Its interface is not as sophisticated as Concrete5, mind you, but it's functionally along the same lines, and is quite nice.
And I've seen several Java CMS tools out there which accomplish basically the same thing, functionally speaking, as Concrete5 and Zimplit; but none of them are as good and stable, overall, as either Concrete5 or Zimplit.
The reader should know, though, that neither Concrete5 nor Zimplit are full-featured, full-blown CMSs. They're more along the lines of cool tools which simply allow one to create and maintain pages in a more or less WYSIWYG sort of way, but without the sophisticated control panels and advanced features that fully-fledged CMSs have. And suggesting which of the freeware and/or open source CMS produts out there is best probably isn't something which this particular article/page should tackle, in my opinion. For that, there seems to already exist a page here which covers that subject.
__________________________
Gregg L. DesElms
Napa, California USA
I only feel the need to respond because I started out with the same opinion of Concrete5 - thinking that it was just a cool editor for managing webpages with an easy to understand UI. I thought the same thing regarding enterprise features, in that I wouldn't ever have suggested it to larger organizations because of lacking a fine-grained permissions system.
However... if you're aware of advanced permissions mode, it'll turn your world upside down (in a good way). C5 actually has one of the best permissions systems I've ever seen built in stock, its just not turned on by default to make it easier to understand for the majority of users. You can control who can do what in the system to an unbelievably detailed level (including publishing, reviewing, managing users, files, pages, etc.), and its just as easy to understand as the rest of the C5 interface.
So, not to refute your argument too much Gregg, but only in the interest of informing - if the criteria for a "full blown CMS" hinges on publishing permissions, fine-grained user permissions, and content editing control, then C5 actually blows most other things out of the water.
Post new comment