Blog about concrete5 cms

Quick tip for developers writing custom blocks for concrete5. If you have coded a block, placed its folder in ‘blocks’ directory but cannot see it available for installation in concrete5 backend (in the "Add functionality" section), check the controller class name. That is the issue in most cases. It should match the block directory, i.e. if your block folder is “my_folder”, then in controlller.php you should have this:

class MyFolderBlockController extends BlockController {

I don’t recommend to use anything in your block directory name except digits, a-z characters and underscores.

If you develop your own block, you will probably need to use some css to properly style it. But the issue is that you can’t access the css file of the users theme (of course if you’re not developing the block for one specific project). However you can create and use custom css file for this specific block type.

Read more…

Some new concrete5 users get confused when they cannot find a way to add table to a page at their concrete5 website. However in fact there are several ways to do that. I will describe 4 ways to add table on the page with concrete5 cms… Read more…

Some concrete5 themes allow to customize background color from admin dashboard. Try this:

1. Sign in to concrete5 dashboard.
2. Go to ‘Pages and Themes‘ section.
3. Click ‘Customize‘ button for a theme you want to edit.
4. If the theme supports the feature, you’ll see ‘Background‘ in theme customization options. You can choose any color using color picker and preview it almost immediatelly. Click ‘Save’ to apply the change.

In previous article we described how to replace sitename with logo by html editing. That was for older versions of concrete5 cms. In the latest cms you can do it without any html knowledge. Here is step-by-step instruction:

1. Sign in to admin dashboard.
2. Go to ‘Scrapbook‘ section.
3. Open ‘Global Scrapbook‘ there.
4. There will be one block there – Content: “My_Site_Name”.

You can go 2 ways: you can either edit this content block and add the picture via ‘Add image’ button, or you can do the following:

1) delete the content block (My_Site_Name);
2) Add new block of ‘Image’ type (it will allow you to choose/upload the logo and set logo dimensions you want);
3) after you add the image block, it will be assigned a default block name like ‘Global Scrapbook 34’. You should click ‘Rename’ button and change the block name to My_Site_Name. Click ‘Save’ to finish the renaming procedure;
4) go to the site frontend and check if the logo is used instead of sitename. If not, that might be a problem with concrete5 theme (currently only cordobo green park theme supports it on our website, but we’ll update the other concrete5 themes soon). You’ll need to edit html code in this case, see this article then.

We wrote about concrete5 generating core dump files on some hostings before, we’ve did a thorough investigation of this problem, but still couldn’t find the exact reason for the core dump files being generated. But most likely it happens when concrete5 tries to allocate more resources than the system allows the php process to get.
If the solution we described (increasing memory limit) doesn’t help you, you can try this workaround which makes concrete5 delete core dump files after the script is run. Our investigations show that usually nothing really bad happens when a core dump file appears, but it might be very bad if you collect numerouse core dump files and exhaust your account limit.

So, try this:
Read more…

I’ve forgot to announce when these concrete5 themes were added to our themes collection. If you have any comments on these themes, please welcome – post it here.

So, here are the latest additions in concrete5 themes:

Desk Mess Mirrored

Shades of Blue

Both themes were converted from popular wordpress templates. If you have some design and want a concrete5 theme, you are welcome to use our theme integration service. We’ll be glad to help you convert design to concrete5 theme.

Wow! It’s pretty hard to write new concrete5 block notices while it’s being released so fast.:) We’ve finished a number of blocks we were working on the last couple of weeks. Twitter Search seems to be the most downloadable addon here. We’ll submit that to concrete5 marketplace as well.

If you have any questions, suggestions, you’re welcome to comment this thread.

Free concrete5 block: Current Date is now available for download on our website.

It’s a very simple block that can be used as an example for developers on how to develop a simple block. Though we hope that somebody will find the real use of this addon.

P.S. Quiet strange, but idea of this block came from a spam comment saying "What’s the time?" That’s our response. Spammers, download the block and go away. Pleeeeease.:)

P.P.S. If you are not a spammer (we hope), check our concrete5 blocks page from time to time. More blocks (and free stuff as well) is coming soon.

We’ve finally finished the first concrete5 addon that is published on our website.

Please welcome the Tag Cloud package for concrete5 cms

This package allows to easily add and edit page tags (via Page Tags) block and to display tag cloud (Tag Cloud block). You can see example on our demo installation:

http://demo.smartwebprojects.net/tag-cloud-package/

We have 2 license types available:

Single website license ($15.00) is for usual website owners. This license allows the buyer to use the addon on one concrete5 website.

Developer license ($60.00) is for web developers, designers and/or web studios who need to have the addon installed on more than 1 website.

See more details (including screenshots) on the block page details:
http://www.smartwebprojects.net/concrete5-blocks/tag-cloud/

There are some more addons in development phase, so check back our site for new updates, subscribe to RSS feed or follow us on twitter 🙂