Recently I’ve been working with Concrete 5 for a small website. I’d never come across it until it was put forward as a solution for this project but as it was open source and had good reviews we’ve been looking at using it in more detail. I’ve been having some trouble trying to figure out how to best integrate some of the data that the site will require, but am slowly making headway.

I started off using custom blocks for the data, but getting it to display on the page as I wanted (and more importantly the client wanted) didn’t seem as easy as I wanted. I found it’s important to have the name of the directory that contains the block files match the name you use for the block class or it won’t be available. (This seems to apply for a lot of structures within Concrete 5).

I’ve now moved onto developing a custom package with all the various pieces I need. It’s been a challenge getting things to work as the documentation hasn’t been as helpful as it first seemed. Another small challenge has been trying to remember what little PHP knowledge I had 🙂