Concrete5

On September 30, 2008, concrete5 version 1.0 was officially released. Since we were exhibiting at OSCON that year in August, we had a few release candidates and some beta versions available beforehand, but this was our first public, committed, upgrade-ready version, just in time for concrete5 to be named SourceForge's Project of the Month for October, 2008.

That was a great honor. I started thinking, though: how many people checked out concrete5 when it was PotM, decided it might not fit their needs, and never looked back? And how many users of version 4 have never seen some of the more humble roots of concrete5? It's with that in mind that I mark this two-year anniversary with a screenshot and feature retrospective, comparing version 5.0.0 with the about-to-be-released 5.4.1. We've come a long way.

If your first exposure to concrete5 was in October of 2008, and you haven't checked us out since, you might want to see what you're missing. Page through the gallery above to see some before and after pictures, including pictures from version 4.1 of concrete5 of features that didn't exist in any form two years ago.

Developer Updates

From concrete5 1.0 to 4.1, we've added the following items:

• Multilingual Support, with developers contributing to over 10 languages. Multilingual support is available for the core and for any installed add-ons.
• Caching support
• Far better mail handling, including the ability to send HTML mail.
• Events for developers to hook into when building their own applications
• An even better MVC syntax
• A hosted, supported marketplace that earns developers real revenue, with over 275 add-ons and themes. We now offer solutions for eCommerce, forums, digital asset management, and much more.
• Even better ways for developers to build blocks, including the ability to include header stylesheets in pages dynamically and better block validation.
• Our interface has gotten even slicker, with AJAX-based block updating that doesn't force an entire page refresh
• A complete discussion system and bug tracking system on concrete5.org.
• Extensive developer documentation.

Thanks to all our users! Let me know what you think.

Andrew Embler has some tricks up his sleeve for September 30, 2012.