First, a bit of history, then a breakdown of what we've done to make concrete5 so much faster in this new release.

We come in #1 in their CMS showdown.

concrete5 5.5 makes it easy to create your own installation sample content with a new file format we call CIF: content import format.

Anyone want to install concrete5 from the command line? 5.5 and our command line installer will let you do just that.

This article provides guidelines and code to let concrete5 add-on developers or anyone setup a concrete5 demo, complete with a limited administrative user, auto-installed packages, and locked down permissions. The demo can easily be reset at any time. (Note this how-to is for concrete5 5.5.0 and later.)

In concrete5 version 5.3.0, we introduced a centralized content repositories called scrapbooks. Here you could add Blocks in one spot, and then paste them throughout your site. Now, with version 5.5.0 we've improved on them in every way. Introducing – Stacks.

Version 5.5 of concrete5 is a great leap forward for our interface. Twitter's new UI toolkit, Bootstrap, is a big part of it. Learn about Bootstrap, how concrete5 uses it, and how you can include it in your blocks, dashboard pages and add-ons.

A list of all the places I know of where concrete5 was lucky enough to be featured in print.

On this week's Totally Random web show, we showed off what's coming in version 5.5. The changes are pretty sweeping. Read on for more info, and a chance to get a sneak peak.

Learn how to write custom concrete5 user reports by subclassing the UserList class.

I've revamped my web presence yet again. I really need to get together an archive of all of them over the years. This design is pretty cool for a number of reasons. I think anyone with a concrete5-powered blog might find some of these approaches useful, especially if it has a technical focus.

Compare the features and screenshots of the very first version of concrete5, released two years ago (September 30, 2008) with version 5.4.1, which will be available in days.

On 9/21/2010 I presented a webinar for Zend (the PHP company) on how we've used the Zend Framework to solve some tough problems in concrete5. It is now online.

concrete5's friendliness toward developers extends beyond blocks and add-ons. An easy-to-understand but very useful MVC syntax powers concrete5's single pages and page types, allowing for helpful separation between code and content.

Learn how concrete5 makes use of the Zend Framework, and why.

This article provides guidelines and code to let concrete5 add-on developers or anyone setup a concrete5 demo, complete with a limited administrative user, auto-installed packages, and locked down permissions. The demo can easily be reset at any time.

An introduction to integrating a wide variety of rich JavaScript functionality into the front-end of your concrete5 applications and blocks.

Learn how to build navigations in concrete5, including what the Auto-Nav does and what its options mean. Then explore some practical examples, how you can control the way it displays and links pages, and how to theme and extend it.

Learn how to build a simple FAQ system from scratch, including a single page interface for listing and sorting entries, a single page interface for editing entries, a page list template for displaying them.

Keep users from landing on concrete5's index.php?cID=xxx pages with a handy, simple snippet of code.

Programmers lambast Apple for using private APIs in its own software – but where do you think public APIs come from?

Here's a simple option you can enable to improve the performance of Zend Cache. I'm including code for usage with concrete5, but this option is available to any application using Zend Cache.

The page list block handles RSS feeds, but what if you need a bit more control? Do you want a prettier URL than the one the page list block generates? Check out this tutorial on a custom RSS feed.

concrete5's custom block templates are powerful - but what if you want the entire functionality of the original block's view template, just wrapped in something else? I'll show you how to make that happen.

Download an iPhone-optimized concrete5 theme, and learn how to automatically display it to mobile Safari on the iPhone and the iPod Touch.

Eek out some more performance out of your site, without pulling your hair out.

I'm migrating from electricstate.com to andrewembler.com. 2010: Out with the old, yadda yadda yadda...

The first concrete5 theme developer screencast.

My firm, Concrete Websites, officially launched the website for Lemonade.com, a startup with whom we’ve been working for months.