concrete5 Launches Version 5.4 With a Trip to SXSW

concrete CMS was commercial software that went open source in late 2008, quickly winning project of the month on SourceForge and much attention from a community of open source fans used to dealing with painful user experiences and scattered code. During the last year the core team behind concrete5 has been flushing out features in their CMS, along with building an active community and marketplace at concrete5.org. Now with the release of version 5.4 concrete5 has really hit its stride and the core team expects continued great growth this summer.

concrete5 powers over 35,000 websites today, with a developer community some 18,000 members strong. “We've grown very quickly since going open source,” says CTO Andrew Embler. “The core application has always been very stable, but in the past we knew there were a few areas we wanted to clean up. With the sitemap improvements and even faster AJAX editing in 5.4 we've really covered the big items on my radar. “

Some architectural changes to better support the needs of enterprise level clients have already allowed some larger organizations to choose concrete5 over Drupal, Joomla!, and WordPress. The additional changes to fully embrace the Zend framework by using Zend Cache and Zend Translate has proven well worth the investment.

“It was great fun showing off the release candidate of 5.4 at SXSW:Interactive this year,' says Franz Maruna, CEO. “We met a lot of Joomla! and Drupal developers who begrudgingly gave us 5 minutes to see the competition, only to walk away 20 minutes later lamenting about time they'd wasted on other systems. I think we showed quite a few people that you can build big powerful sites with concrete5 that really are easy to use.”

See the complete feature list in 5.4 here:http://www.concrete5.org/documentation/background/version_history/version-5-4-0/