The following are the latest add-ons to be released for Concrete5.  If you need assistance with customizing or installing any add-on please let us know.  Also, check out Pixo's latest add-ons.

See the new Concrete5 composer in action.  The new composer gives added flexability to work with any page type and the ability to create functionality specific to site editor needs.

Mobile usage online has taken off in a big way.  Nearly 50% of all searches now happen on a mobile device.  How are you managing your user's interactions with your business online?  We have a solution for Concrete5 users that works!  Pixo's Responsive Concrete5 themes can be custom made and applied to any Concrete5 website and gives your users the ultimate user experience on devices such as smartphones (i.e. iPhones) and tablets (i.e. iPads).

Pixo Web Design & Strategy, a fast growing website design agency in Arvada, is in need of a freelance website designer/developer for 20-40 hours of work per week.  Must be a guru in the areas of CSS/HTML.  Very basic knowledge of PHP will be required with a development background being an added bonus. 

We will train you on the fastest growing open source content management system on the market (Concrete5) and on cutting edge theme design.  $16-19 per hour based on your current skill sets and your ability to learn quickly. And you can work from home!

The new release of Concrete5 5.6.1 is a nice upgrade.  One of the irratating things that developers and users alike have run into, from time to time, is where you make a chance to a page on your website and either it doesn't appear or (even more irratating) it doesn't appear for everyone.  The solution was to go and clear the site cache and usually that would fixed the problem.

From time to time we get calls from Concrete5 website owners whose sites were improperly built or their website has errors or need customization.  We have over 3 years of experience with Concrete5 and have been working with the content management system almost since it went public.  We specialize in fixing concrete5 websites. 

A CMS or Content Management System is a tool that is used to manage a website's content.  Content usually includes the text and images on a website.  Using a CMS you can add, edit or delete content on a website and typically it allows you add and delete pages of a website.  A CMS such as Concrete5 gives someone without technical knowledge to make changes to a website.

The following is a sneak peak of what Pixo has found that you can anticipate seeing in the next Concrete5 release the beginning of next year:

Congrats goes to Concrete5 for winning the CMS Critic People's Choice Award for Best Open Source Content Management System.  It looks like it was a close battle with CMS Made Simple for first place but in the end Concrete5 prevailed. 

The following is our picks for the best Concrete5 add-ons based on general usability, functionality and support.  We've blogged about this before but there have been a number of new additions to the Concrete5 Marketplace since then and a number of add-ons have been updated.  So the following is our 10 ten picks for Concrete5:

Forbes writer Victor Lipman wrote an article today about Pixo Vice President Amber Johnson's speech in Steamboat this last weekend about the effectiveness of mommy blogging social media campaigns.  You can read the entire article here.  To quote Mr Lipman in his Forbes article:

A little over a week ago I headed to Oregon to meet with Franz Maruna, CEO of Concrete5 to talk about Concrete5, find out how the marketplace works and see where Concrete5 is heading.  Everyone at Concrete5 that I had a chance to meet were great to speak with and a pleasure to be around.  The corporate office is in a rejuvenated warehouse near downtown Portland on an upper level floor of the building.  Franz mentioned that they are going to be knocking down a wall this week to expand the offices and to increase their space. They currently have 12 employees plus a lot of volunteers.

Pixo has just release a new Concrete5 form add-on that allows you to put your Concrete5 form block field labels inside the form field.  This handy add-on allows you to create forms that are more compact which is great when you don't have a lot of space in sidebars and other tight spots to have wide form elements.  This add-on also creates the form fields tableless so if you want to style the form elements using CSS it is easy to do.  Two great custom templates with this one add-on.

Pixo has developed a new add-on that allows you to put the label for a text field for the Concrete5 form block inside the text field like you see below.  Often site administrators have limited space for form fields in sidebars  and other areas of a site and as a result the standard Concrete5 block doesn't work well because with the label to the left of the text field it takes up a lot of space.  With the custom templates that install with this add-on you will now be able to create forms that have the lables for text fields and text areas inside the form field.  You also get the advantage of tableless form fields that are easy to style if you want to give your form a particular look.

At Pixo we work hard but we also like to have fun!  Guess the weight of Pixo President Jamie Johnson's giant pumpkin (all entries have to be received by September 27th) and win FREE search engine optimization setup for your website ($600 value).  The individual with the guess closest to the correct weight without going over will be selected.  Send your entries via our Contact page form.

Sometimes we get asked if Concrete5 is robust enough to manage a major, mission critical website.  Major brands such as HP (http://www.openwebosproject.org) trust Concrete5 to run their websites.  Why?  Because it is easy to use, allows for work flow, includes advanced permissions, requires less training for employees, is scalable, has a lower overall cost point then most open source CMS avilable and is ready for enterpise content management.

The latest release of Concrete5 is now public.  From Concrete5:

"concrete5 5.6.0 introduces a completely rearchitected advanced permissions system that is better in every way. 5.6.0 also adds a new workflow system (which uses these permissions), an updated UI, and over a hundred other bug fixes and feature improvements. Read on for a video of the new permissions and workflow systems."

Our recommendation is if your Concrete5 website is version 4.2.2 or older that there would be some real advantages to upgrading your website now.

There is now a beta release for Concrete5 version 5.6 now available.  This new release includes a total revamp for how the Advanced Permission System works and we like it.  The full release of version 5.6 is scheduled for August 28th.

Local vs. National SEO

Many businesses find that they are small fish in a big pond with it comes to search engine optimization (SEO).  Do a search for the type of business you are in on Google and you are likely to find that you are competing with 1 million national websites for 10 positions on page one of Google. If you aren’t on page one than more than likely you aren’t being found.  What many website owners don’t know is that you can localize your search engine optimization to reduce the size of the pond and be found on Google.  Even if you are selling your products nationally you can localize to get into many smaller ponds so that you can rank highly in the search results for specific keywords on a local level.

Concrete5 will be releasing the next release of Concrete5 on August 28th.  Advanced Permissions will be getting a full revamp as part of this release.  Watch for more details around the first week of August.