From the moment you pass through the estate gates and along the cobblestone paths, to the time you can spend wandering our working vineyard and rose covered arbors, you’ll know you have discovered a uniquely exquisite destination. Located approximately 40 miles from downtown Los Angeles and Burbank Airport the hotel extends over 17 landscaped acres and is a short drive from the scenic Malibu coastline, the Performing Arts Center, Ronald Reagan Library, high-end shopping areas and many notable corporate headquarters.

With the great results seen from the Bogie’s Bar Concrete5 based site (located on the same property), we set out to redesign the already-existing static Westlake Village Inn site.

Designed from an existing site, this project required ground-up rewriting of the code in pure HTML and CSS for the Westlake Village Inn. Afterwards, we implemented the site into Concrete5 so that the Inn staff could easily make changes and keep their content current.

Major plans are currently underway to expand the site further thanks to the vast extensibility of the Concrete5 CMS.

DanceConnectLA is a portal for local DJ’s and music enthusiasts in the Hollywood, CA area.

It’s a very elegant demonstration of Concrete5, one of my favorite content management systems. It allows for simple, GUI-based updates so that clients can take control of their sites, rather than having to pay costly maintenance fees for minor changes. So, check it out!

I’m beginning a new website for Bogies Bar (map). The client desired a simple and effective way to manage and update content on their site without having to pay an IT support person each time. As a result, I’ve opted to use a wonderful new, open-source content management system, called Concrete5. The Concrete team’s tagline for the product is “A CMS made for Marketing, but strong enough for Geeks!” Essentially this means a marketing team that has minimal experience with web design and scripting languages can still easily and effectively manage a C5 website. At the same time, C5 is extremely extensible, and web-designer geeks like us can write add-ons and themes, and even sell them in the C5 Marketplace!

I’ll provide some more detailed how-to’s after the first of the year, but this CMS is shaping up to be extremely helpful to many businesses looking to make more extensive use of their internet presence. I’ve implemented websites in many similar softwares, such as Joomla, WordPress, Drupal, and ExpressionEngine. I can confidently say that C5 is by far the most client-friendly, elegant solution I have seen to date.

In order to get a Concrete5 based site up and running, you will need a web-server with PHP5 support. The following is a brief explanation of how to get a C5 site running, and how to implement your own theme.

1. First, grab a copy of C5 and copy it to your web-server. Then, navigate there in your favorite web browser, and proceed with the installation. You will likely need to create a new MYSQL database on your server to link the installation to.
2. Create a new directory in /Concrete5/themes/ (for the sake of this tutorial, we will name the theme’s directory “b_rad”)
3. Create a text file, named “description.txt”, and save it under /Concrete5/themes/b_rad/. The first line of text in this document should be the theme’s name, and the second line should contain a brief description of the theme.
4. Create a 120px by 90px screenshot of the theme, and save it as thumbnail.png in /Concrete5/themes/b_rad/.
5. Copy in an existing static HTML/CSS theme, complete with any CSS and Javascript directories if they exist. If you don’t have a theme designed yet, you can design it yourself, or download a free theme for testing purposes.
6. Rename index.html (or any HTML page you want to create a Concrete5 page type for) to default.php, and open it with your favorite text editor.  Keep in mind that default themes require you to have at least a default.php, but many other addons require view.php, left_sidebar.php, and right_sidebar.php.
7. Modify any relative links for CSS and images — they will look like this:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/style.css" />

<img src="images/logo.png" />

So change them to this:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="<?php= $this->getStylesheet('css/style.css'); ?>" />

<img src="<?php=$this->getThemePath(); ?>/images/logo.png" />

8. Completely replace the title element in the header like so:

<?php Loader::element('header_required'); ?>

9. Add this line to the footer (before the body is closed)
10. To create editable regions such as navigation, divs, and ad space, implement the following code:

<?php $left_nav = new Area('Left Nav'); $left_nav->display($c); ?>

This creates a new editable region, referred to as $left_nav, that is recognized by Concrete5.

11. After this, you can continue creating more editable regions. When you’re ready to test the implementation of the theme, browse to the Concrete5 administrator dashboard, and activate the theme! Enjoy.

concrete5 – incontext editing makes running a website simple on Vimeo.