WordPress vs. WPEngine - Woah!

Concrete ships with a great deal more solutions built into the core than WordPress. We have everything from Calendars, Multi-lingual, SEO, Forms, Multi-site, Permissions, Workflow - really a complete robust set of enterprise grade CMS tools built into a single codebase. We release a new version every month on the first Tuesday. We power websites for Fortune 500 companies, governments around the world, and the U.S. Army. We also power websites about churches, schools, clubs, personal causes and even a museum of insects. The in-context editing of Concrete has been at the heart of the platform from day one because we built Concrete as a CMS to power complex pixel perfect websites for clients. It didn’t start as a blog and turn into a CMS. 

That said, WordPress has been an amazing example of what a community can do together. I’ve yet to meet someone who was deeply impressed with WordPress’ code or technical approach, but man have they done an amazing job being a go-to solution for a massive amount of people. Before social media, in the times of blogging when the web was still recovering from the first dot-com bubble burst, “WordPress” was the answer for anyone interested in this whole web 2.0 thing. They got the local events thing perfectly right from the beginning. If you thought your business might need a website, you’d end up going to some bar or coffee shop for a meetup event and get introduced to designers, developers, SEO experts, small agencies - everything you needed to make the web part of what you did. All of that community came together under the banner of “WordPress” and the velocity was incredible. Since Matt studied political science in college, it made sense to me that he’d bring a community organizer style of leadership to the table. 

“Open Source” means a lot of things to a lot of people. Clearly to Matt there’s a strong element of community contribution. Wordpress has a  “5 for the future” commitment where you’re expected to tithe 5% of your time or resources towards the WordPress open source project. Matt seems pretty upset that WPEngine may not be meeting those requirements, and it seems like he’s willing to make it clear that not contributing can have a real impact on their business by turning off Plugin support. I can feel the political science background here too, perhaps a little more LBJ than Obama.

For us at Concrete CMS, “open source” simply means you can do what you want with the source code. Our code is MIT licensed, meaning you can literally rebrand it Cement CMS and sell it for all we care. WordPress is GPL licensed which creates some restrictions around how you can repackage and distribute work that contains it. That always felt needlessly complex to us. To me, giving is giving. Once it’s given, it’s not for me to decide whether I like what you’re doing with it or not. 

For us at Concrete CMS, community contributions are great to have, but they’re not expected or required. Very much appreciated, but never demanded. I don’t like to be “volun-told” what to do, and I doubt many people do. I don’t like to beg or guilt people for donations, so we don’t do that. If you’ve solved a challenge and have a pull request for the core you’d like to contribute, we will eagerly review it and be deeply appreciative of the help. If you’ve got some time to help other people in the Forums, you’re making the world a better place - and we love it! If you’ve got an improvement to the core you’d like to see happen, and a budget to drive it forward, we’ll work hard at finding a path to make that happen for you. If not, that’s cool too. 

We need Concrete to exist to keep the clients we have happy. We’ve grown over the years and become a mature company with SOC 2 validated deployment and vulnerability management processes. If you’ve got a client worried about high availability, custom compliance & security requirements, or uptime SLAs that are hard to meet as a small agency, we can help you win that project with our hosting services. We’re not trying to prove a point about crowd-sourcing with our work here. We think Concrete is a great building material for websites. Try it out and I think you will too.

We love our unique culture and energy. By no means are we perfect, but we’re proud of what we’ve built, and I know our customers love it. That said, I have no idea what it’s like to be able to spend 3000+ hours a week on building a platform, so I have no idea what it’s like to be WordPress. Clearly what they have done works very well for many. If the differences I outlined above are appealing to you, Concrete might be worth a closer look.