As part of a new year’s resolution, I’m trying to expand my toolset for working on the web. I’ve learned a lot over the last year, but my skills are still pretty limited. My weapons of choice for building sites now are WordPress for content management, and Foundation as a framework that makes responsiveness very, very easy to deal with (over the last six months, responsive design has become something of a buzzphrase in web).
While WordPress has served me incredibly well (and has been a great jumping-off point for harder PHP), the CMS can sometimes be overkill when constructing smaller multi-page sites that may not be regularly posting dynamic content. It’s tough, too, to strike a balance between having a robust framework ready to build a site on, and needing to strip it down to be more manageable. I had heard a little about Concrete5, so I decided to download it this morning and do some test development with it.
The first problem I ran into is with GoDaddy — Concrete5′s URL rewrites don’t jive well with it, apparently (as an aside, I’ve been hearing for a while now that GoDaddy is basically awful and that I should move my hosting elsewhere). But I was able to overcome this by adding a line to the php5.ini file, so not a huge hurdle. As I write this I’m starting to pick apart what makes a Concrete5 theme work. Updates to come.
Anyone else experienced with Concrete5 or other CMSs I should check out? Let me know.
