Concrete CMS vs. Modern Campus CMS

Concrete5 is perfect for a website that needs to be regularly updated without accessing the code, whether that be because a developer created your site for you, or because you yourself are a developer who wants to keep the time spent on updates down.

In my experience, it's less useful for modern web apps such as PWAs that would benefit more from technologies such as React and Vue.

Incentivized

This website works well in an academic setting. It's easy to add pages as your site expands/grows. It's really easy to use and modify pages once you know what you're doing, but it can be a little tricky to get the hang of it at first. It is definitely useful to have in-person or virtual training before you dive in.

Incentivized

• Concrete5 has a modular editing system, so you can edit the pages without having knowledge of coding. You just pick the module you want to insert or edit and click where you want it to go.
• You are able to edit modules in an HTML format if you would like to, so if you have the knowledge you can have even more control over your modules.
• You can also edit entire page themes by selecting them from the page layout menu. This allows you a greater versatility of the pages on your site.

Incentivized

• Assets are easily managed and can be edited independently of the page they exist on.
• Version history is handled well. Allows for a comment section to note what changes have been made.
• Dependency tags are perfect for media that is used in several places. Upload a photo once, use it in multiple places, edit the photo or its description in one place.

Incentivized

• Concrete5.6 websites have no good path to migrate to 5.7, short of manual content migration. This is a big problem and affected the user community negatively.
• Some features that were available as paid add-ons in 5.6, such as discussion forums and e-commerce shopping cart, are missing from newer versions 5.7/5.8.
• Starting to develop add-ons and customizations for Concrete5 can be challenging as 5.7/5.8 documentation is not yet complete.

Incentivized

• OU Campus could use some improving on their upload changes as far as naming the document because when you are trying to upload the same document with minor revisions, OU Campus requires you to change the name of the document within OU Campus which creates multiple documents in the workfolder.
• When naming documents to upload into OU Campus, it would be nice if we could name out documents the way we would instead of having to put an underscore to indicate a space in the document. Most users of OU Campus has not had proper training to know that you need to do that.

I have had nothing but good experiences with Concrete5. I have used it on several client websites and even several of my own sites. It is the leading CMS I will go to if I have a need to dynamically update content on a website by people who are typically untrained. They have solved every angst I had with the other solutions I have evaluated in the past and continue to be the simplest to implement and customize.

I don't work at the college any longer, but I believe they will renew the license for the OU Campus Content Management System because of all the great benefits they have had since they initially deployed it. The system is very intuitive and easy to use. Department leads love it. The IT department also loves it because it saves them a lot of time and resources.

Although there is a slight learning curve (as with any software), it is very easy to use once you get a hold of it. It is easy to upload and manage files (and other digital assets), and the drag-n-drop interface on the front-end is easy for end-users to understand

Incentivized

Once you've been training how to use it, it's really easy to use it on a daily basis

Incentivized

Since it's not tied to a central server (other than for authorizing updates and assigning licenses to specific sites), it's available pretty much 100% of the time.

Incentivized

The site works extremely well, the front end flies, searches and form submissions are very fast indeed. The reason its a 9 not a ten? the back end can be a little slow at times, and this is unfair, because for the backend to be so amazing, it has to do a huge amount of work!

Concrete5 is open-source and has an incredibly strong, polite, and supportive community. You can get an answer to nearly anything you want to do with Concrete5 by googling for it, searching the Concrete5 discussion forums or stack overflow, or posting your question to the forum. Members are very courteous and do not look down on those with less knowledge. And answers are always quick, informative, and supportive.

Incentivized

The support at OmniUpdate is one of the reasons we continued with the company when time for renewal of contract.

It's important that any CMS is implemented by a skilled developer. Content management is not a commodity. One of the keys I've found with Concrete5 is to create a homogenous content-entry method (e.g. focus on in-context editing OR focus on using the Composer feature). This seems to make it more likely that site editors will be able to easily come back to editing after a layoff without having to "remember" too much.

Incentivized

The support team at OmniUpdate is available to assisting campuses with implementation

I didn't have to spend too much time learning Concrete CMS, whereas I had to spend a long time learning other CMSs. After struggling to develop a plugin for WordPress, developing an add-on for Concrete CMS was piece of cake thanks to many available APIs. Making custom themes and blocks was much easier than WordPress.

I think the visual editing and version control. If the CMS server is down the website is still live because of content independent of the server.

• Even though the Concrete5 community is growing, it's still not up to the level as some of the other WCMS communities.
• More detailed statistics with historical data could be provided by the system.
• Concrete5 hihgly depends on Jquery. It makes it hard to upgrade the javascript library since the control panel depends on it.

• Increased satisfaction with user experience. OU Campus has made it easier for us to address problems when they arise, making our website more efficient.
• Role-based control. Our old CMS made it very easy for users to change fonts and colors on their sections, which was very detrimental to the overall brand. That's not a problem anymore.
• Reduced training times. OU Campus is so easy to use, I've been able to cut training times down by half.

Incentivized