It's amazing to think Katalysis has been building web projects using the
excellent concrete5 content management system for nearly 10 years!
concrete5 is an Open Source project run by Portland Labs in Oregon
and supported by hundreds of contributors around the world. The sharing
and collaborative improvement that is part of an open source project
means that concrete5 has brought huge benefits to all our clients.
My trip to CascadiaPHP 2018 Conference in Portland this September gave
me the opportunity to meet fellow concrete5 community members
and catch up on the latest news with the core concrete5 team.
multi-million dollar U.S. Army Contract
The really big news for concrete5 this year is a new, multi-million dollar, ten year contract with the U.S. Army. The U.S. Army Family and Morale, Welfare and Recreation program uses concrete5 to make it easy for millions of service members and their families to access the information that’s important to them.
This new agreement underpins the ongoing development of concrete5 and will lead directly to improvement and innovation that will benefit all users...
Fedramp and ISO27001 Certification
concrete5 has recruited Lisa Nicholson as Chief Information and Security Officer. Lisa will be working to deliver US Government FedRAMP Certification and at the same time ISO 27001 Certification for concrete5 by April 2019. This will allow any organisation using concrete5 to include these recognised Information Security Management Systems Certifications in their own security processes. For organisations that don’t require such rigorous security protocols it’s still reassuring to know that the core concrete5 code is subject to this level of scrutiny.
Multi site management
concrete5 version 9 is on the horizon and will bring multi-site management into the concrete5 core. This will make it easier for anyone who wants to run multiple websites on multiple domains or subdomains to share content and resources between the sites.
New forum component
A chat with Andrew Embler, Portland Labs Chief Technical Officer reveals that there is to be a new Forum component for concrete5. This is will provide a useful addition to many of the association/community sites we develop at Katalysis.
Looking ahead
My Portland trip gave me the chance to meet many of the new Portland Labs team members who will be working to take concrete5 forward, among them... Senior User Interface Director Gary Cribb who’ll be bringing design improvements to the editing experience. Support Developer Myq Larson who is providing support and building communication within the concrete5 community.
Overall my long weekend in Portland provided incite and plenty of inspiration as well as the chance to enjoy the excellent company of the enthusiastic and talented concrete community. I'm left feeling more confident than ever that concrete5 is absolutely the right choice to deliver the design flexibility we need in a way that’s secure, dependable and cost effective for our clients.
Huge thanks to all at Portland Labs for your generosity and hospitality.
