Concrete5 5.7 Released and Updated

The Concrete5  team has been busy recently, releasing version 5.7, before updating it twice. They've also released some developer resources for anybody wanting to delve into the code.

Concrete5 is an open-source content management system with a reputation for flexibility and its strong community.

Version 5.7 brought about a myriad of updates, and Concrete5 has continued to add to it since. The result? A long, long list of new stuff for Concrete5 users to enjoy.

“Deep Changes” with Concrete5 5.7

Concrete5 5.7 has enhancements for a long list of areas. Users will find that content editing, theme customization, and so forth have all been optimized.

Regarding the release, Concrete5 CTO Andrew Embler had this to say:

“For the first time in 6 years, we’ve decided to not put backward compatibility first and foremost. We really wanted to have a clean slate, so we could embrace ideas that involved deep changes to the system.”

Here's a breakdown of what's new with Concrete5.

Editing

• A completely new layout engine allows for inline editing of content, layouts and style customization. Blocks can be dragged into the page and easily rearranged.
• Inline content editing uses the Redactor editor, a beautiful editor with deep integration to concrete5, and full bootstrap 3 interface integration.
• The Dashboard user interface is completely updated. Navigating it is much easier, and the interface is much more attractive.
• concrete5’s user interface is now powered by Bootstrap 3.

Themes and Blocks

• Concrete5 now ships with the all-new and better looking Elemental theme.
• The concrete5 Dashboard, main toolbar and Elemental theme are all fully responsive.
• Themes can optionally refer to grid frameworks, and can have full grid support built-in. Layouts have been substantially updated to support these grid frameworks (as well as be fully responsive.)

Pages and Architecture

• Page types and page templates are now two separate concepts. Page types refer to pages as objects – Blog Entry, Empty Page, Project, Product – and page templates refer to templates that actually appear in themes. The same page type can be run in multiple themes.
• concrete5’s Composer is now a very flexible form builder that can route attributes and blocks into different page templates. Each page type has its own custom instance of Composer.
• A Feed Object is available in the Dashboard (and created through the Page List block), giving Page Lists the ability to create RSS feeds that are permalinked.

Files

• A completely new image editor is now built-in. Resize and crop images, and add filters.
• File manager thumbnails are now completely extensible. Multiple thumbnails at different breakpoints can power the picture tag in a theme that supports it.
• File storage locations are now pluggable. An adapter for Amazon S3 is coming shortly.

Conversations

• Conversations are now built-in, with the Conversations block replacing the Guestbook block. Conversations is a reusable, object-oriented way to build conversations throughout a site, and use the same system for powering a guestbook as ultimately powering a forum. Conversations features threading, asynchronous loading, file attachments, spam filtering, flagging, rating and more.

And that's not even half of it. To find out more about Concrete5 5.7, check out the release notes.

Developer Resources, Versions 5.7.0.1 & 5.7.0.3

Since the release of version 5.7, Concrete5 has rolled out some developer resources, along with two patches in the form of versions 5.7.0.1 and 5.7.0.3.

That's a lot of activity to keep up with, so here are all the highlights, along with the download link to the very latest Concrete5 release.

Concrete 5.7 Architecture Video (Developer Resource)

Feature Updates

• Broke out debug settings into two separate settings: Display errors and Error Detail level (message vs. stack trace.) Defaulting to show error messages in a nice way (not the detailed stack trace).

Behavioral Improvements

• Helpful error notice for users attempting to use topics attribute without a topic tree created
• Improved page list and page, users and file date filtering with time zone support
• Help overlay in dashboard starts lower, doesn’t obscure default buttons.
• Improved My Account Navigation
• Page drafts no longer say “Warning, this is a system page” when you try and delete them.

Miscellaneous Improvements

• Form submissions “today” now respects user’s local time zone
• Fixed some untranslated strings and dates
• Added detail error message when attempting to use grid methods on areas in themes that don’t support them.
• Fallback to GD if Imagemagick is older than version 6.2.9 (which previously triggered errors)
• Context menu on sitemap, file manager and more moves to the right if there isn’t enough room to display top or bottom

I told you it was a long list.

The Concrete5 blog has all of this information, and much more. Yep, this long list isn't even complete, as the bug fixes are plentiful.

Also, be sure to explore more of Concrete5 via our CMS Directory.