Concrete5 is an excellent replacement for tired and outdated Joomla websites. To assist developers with the move from Joomla to concrete5 we thought we'd help out by developing a transition guide. This guide has been recently published as part of the official concrete5 documentation.
The File block in concrete5 is perhaps overlooked when building a site as the Content block can also easily link to downloadable files. With a few overrides, we can make the File block much more useful.
Blocks within concrete5 can have their template's overridden easily for customisation, and the content block is no exception. Here are a few ideas of what you can do by overriding the view.php file for the content block.
We've released some free blocks to the concrete5 marketplace. They're called 'List Files From Set', 'Lightboxed Image' and 'Image Banner'. Here's a quick writeup about them.
I’m a big fan of Concrete5. The system is incredibly powerful, flexible, easy to develop and most of all easy for end users. However, it can at times be a little ‘heavy’ on a server, so I looked into a way to add a lightweight cache around it. Many sites are really quite static, so this cache addition is designed to try to make Concrete5 as ‘static’ in performance as possible.
Concrete5 has built-in an image block, that allows users to upload and add images to pages. It features the ability to resize images by typing in a width and/or height to restrict image size. An issue with this, is that a client then need to contend with the concept of 'pixels' This post has a simple way to make the resizing of images automatic based on what area the image block is placed in.
I've always liked the idea of one or two page 'cheat sheets' when developing. Although systems Concrete5 has a healthy amount of documentation on the web, it can be handy to have something in front of you to check function and variable names. Over time I've scavenged a list of items for Concrete5 that I have often used in development. It is simple supposed to be a single page that can help you remember what is available and how it is used. Really obvious things have been omitted, leaving only things (that I feel) are regularly used, but perhaps hard to remember.
The web is a great platform to share information and advertise your business or organisation. For a website owner, it can be difficult to understand what you are paying for and what the different terminology means.
To help our clients quickly get up to speed with maintaing their Concrete5 website, we've developed a printable 'Quick Start Guide' that covers a range of common tasks. We've made this guide downloadable, and we hope developers and clients find it useful.
Web development is not just about understanding how to build websites, it's also about using a range of tools to create content, solve problems and manage systems. This blog post outlines the main tools we use on our Macs.
The blog post shows how you can creates pages in Concrete5 so that they are suitable for pulling into other pages via Javascript. In this example, the pages are still editable as normal, and can have blocks placed on them. A video also shows how we've used this in conjunction with custom page attributes on our own site.
This post is a summary of all the valid and legitimate SEO practices for website's I've read about. I'm frustrated with the idea of it being a secret, so I've tried to explain everything.
After not finding a slideshow plugin that fit my needs exactly, I decided to write my own plugin for Concrete5. It was also a great opportunity to learn more about creating Concrete5 plugins. The slideshow is based off of the fantastic Nivo Slider (credits in post). The plugin effectively wraps up this jQuery based effect, allowing it to be easily customised.
To develop websites I'm a big fan of Panic's Coda. It's a great editor, with lots of well designed built in functions. It like many other text editors includes a 'snippets' function that stores regularly used pieces of code. I use this feature to store small snippets of code that helps me put together a specifically configured Concrete5 website quickly.
Content management systems allow website owners to quickly add and change content on their site. From our development point of view, it tends to be easier for us to develop a new site with a CMS because the site then also becomes easier for us to add content ourselves. Over several years we’ve used and tried out a variety of free systems, in particular, Joomla and WordPress and have really loved the functionality they provide.
We do the majority of our website development on macs, using MAMP as an easy to run webserver with Apache, PHP and MySQL. This setup is great for local development as the environment MAMP provides is very close to what most web hosts provide and the web server is easy to manage.
When the decision was made to expand the business and create the Mesuva Web Development identity, we recognised that we could use a lot of online technology to help things run smoothly.
Email: info@mesuva.com.au
Phone: (08) 8121 4440
Skype: mesuvawebdevelopment
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