Last updated March 6, 2023 by Antti Koskenrouta

Having developed mostly with WordPress, I was excited to have an opportunity to work with Concrete 5, or C5 for short. It is yet another PHP/MySQL-based content management system but its approach is very different from WordPress. While there is a “backend,” all content editing is done on the page itself. While A user is logged in, C5 adds a bar to the top if the window like WordPress does. To edit a page, you simply click a button to enter the ‘editing mode.’ To edit existing content, you click on a content block and make the updates. Then you can save and approve the changes right there on the same page.

Where C5 differs the most from WordPress is that the page layouts don’t include any content areas like WordPress pages do. Instead the layouts include areas where the user can add any number of content blocks. The blocks can be also different types, for example: plain text, HTML, or be a plugin-type of block that performs a certain function.

On one hand this allows the user to create a more complex page by mixing and matching different blocks content. With WordPress this would be possible only through extensive useof plugins and shortcodes. As a developer I like this approach because it also makes the content, well, more contained. Since the ares of where the user can enter content will also make it harder for the user to break the page inadvertently.

On the other hand this ‘content area’ approach can be a blessing in disguise; when setting up a new site, it can be challenging to make certain blocks appear on a set of pages.

C5 definitely has its strengths and is probably great for sites where the user wants the freedom to create complex, content-rich pages based within a predefined layout. Where it falls short of WordPress is its plugins and expandability and community support.

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