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A Trip to Concrete5 World Headquarters

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. Franz and I sat down to lunch at a local resturant just a few blocks away from the Concrete5 building.  He said that there won't be a new release for Concrete5 in 2012 but he hopes to have a new release ready in early 2013.  Look for some added social functionality to be part of the next release, which is something I know that Pixo clients will be interested in. We talked about how Concrete5 site owners use of the marketplace some because at that time Pixo was in the process of releasing it's first Marketplace add-on, Pixo Form Templates, and we wanted to know how that whole process would work.  Pixo has created a number of add-ons in the past but this is the first add-on we've put into the Marketplace. Franz and his team came about developing Concrete5 partically by accident and partially by necessity.  The earliest version of Concrete5 was developed to run a client website that wouldn't run properly on existing open source CMS systems.  Later what was developed was used for other clients and was slowly built out.  As business got slow during the economic turn down of 2008 the team started a concerted effort on building out what has become Concrete5.  At this time Franz estimates that there are over 250,000 installations of Concrete5 with that number rapidly increasing.  A number of Enterprise level sites are also now using Concrete5. A big thanks to Franz for the time to meet together!