Hello, readers!

Some of you may have noticed that things look a little different than the last time you visited. Well, that is because I've changed CMSes again. After running into the Concrete5 CMS at work, I discovered I really quite liked it. So after tinkering with it on my scratch domain, I decided to go with it for a while. Why? Well, I have a couple of reasons that may sway you.

One, it is open source. "But, Wordpress and Drupal are open source as well" I hear you say. And, you are absolutely right! Unfortunately Drupal 8 does not agree with my host due to it not liking the MySQL version, and Wordpress... To me, Wordpress is like the Mac OS X of CMS platforms. It does what it says on the tin, it looks pretty, it's good for new users to grasp and understand, but it limits what can be done and configure in favour of not being to scary and intimidating by giving the users the horribly scary thing called choice. Perhaps I've been spoiled by pretty much every other CMS providing a way to have a superadmin and creating custom roles for the clients so they only have access to the publishing features so the site is wordpress-like in terms of simplicity for their login...

And Joomla makes me feel uncomfortable when I use it. I don't know, it just comes across as "rickety" to me. I've lost track of how many times I've had to patch and tweak the one Joomla install we have. Heh, I've even patched the exploitable file uploader ( Which the owner of the site will not allow me to fix properly ) to act as a honeypot by making anything that isn't an image 404.

Another reason why this is nice, is the default responsive theme - it does not scream "Basic Bootstrap Theme!" when you use it. Oh, and the layout tools! This is the feature that really won me over, guys.

Being able to create your layout the way you want it is quite possible, without having to create template overrides for each page, or making customized template pages. You can add blocks, and add "layout" blocks which will create as many columns as you want -- that's how I created the recent blog postings block with the video next to it on the front page -- and it's so easy to add in content areas, or whatever you want, really. I've not tried integrating PHP code yet, that'll be coming up soon.

There are a couple of bugs in the UI -- and these have been reported -- But they are minor and once you know they are there, they are easily avoided. The main one I've found is that if you click on an editable content area to start editing it, then start on another, the first content area will not close down properly and remain editable, but without the editing UI buttons to be able to save / cancel / format text.

All in all, I'm quite enjoying this. The admin UI theme is nice, I find it mostly intuitive (there were a couple of things I had to look up how to do, not too bad), and it seems pretty responsive and quick. Ooh, I wonder if I can dig up a caching addon, or setting, to improve performance further... Oh hey there's a caching setting for this page. Ooooh...

Welp, looks like I just found something to tinker with, so I'll end this blog post for now. Thanks for reading my ramblings!