Concrete5 Gets a Facelift With Twitter Bootstrap
concrete5 today announced that it has redesigned the company’s admin dashboard to leverage Twitter Bootstrap.
An early pioneer of in-context editing, concrete5 gained popularity due to its ease of use for managing the content of websites. With this in mind, the company has leveraged the Twitter Bootstrap toolkit to offer a completely redesigned, centralized dashboard for backend administrative tasks with the release of concrete5.5.1.
While concrete5 is frequently used by webshops to deliver sites to clients who want to make edits on their own, many people who use concrete5 are DIY websites on budget webhosts where concrete5 is acting as a self-publishing platform. Over two-thirds of the traffic hitting concrete5 servers isn’t coming to its public facing community concrete5.org at all. The company knew it needed to improve the learning experience from within the concrete5 application itself.
“We started just wanting to make it easier to get around the Dashboard and browse our marketplace from within your own site, but we quickly realized we were going to have to touch every part of the interface to do it right,” said concrete5 designer Robert Huston. “Twitter Bootstrap gave us an amazing style guide, and much of the infrastructure we needed right out the box. With some addition icon work and thoughtful application of the rules the Twitter team devised, we were able to accomplish months of work in just weeks.”
“A lot of time has gone into tuning things under the hood with this release,” added Andrew Embler, CTO of concrete5. “Performance on a default install of concrete5 has improved dramatically in this version, and new features like Stacks and Global Block Areas provide best-practice solutions to problems that had been solved organically in the past.”
New installs now include a wizard explaining how people can get started, and a daily news feed laid out like a magazine helping people learn more over time. The browse marketplace functionality has been dramatically improved, and users can now even purchase add-ons and themes without ever leaving their own sites.
About concrete5
Concrete CMS Inc. is a leading developer of next- generation open source solutions for web sites. The company's flagship product, concrete5, combines the ease-of-use of a blogging platform with the flexibility and power of a web development platform. To date, hundreds of thousands of advertising and creative agencies and web developers around the world have downloaded concrete5 for free and used the technology to quickly and inexpensively build enterprise-quality web sites that can be updated by end users. concrete CMS is a privately held company based in Portland, Oregon, and manages the concrete5.org project. For more information, please visit http://www.concrete5.org.