Sample code and discussion of Concrete5
This site is built with what is now an old version of Concrete5. My initial impression of Concrete5 was that it would be good for small sites like this one. The interace it provides for editing content is great. (I really should make more frequent use of it 
) I found some things that I didn't like about it. They are discussed below.
It recently (May 2012) came to my attention that Concrete5 has replaced some of it's own code with that from Zend Framework. Since a lot of my work lately has been with ZF I think it's time to take a new look at Concrete5. I need to update this site anyway and was thinking of a switch to Drupal. New plan is to update to the latest Concrete5 and reevalute it.
Stay turned for updates.
Page Types and Themes
One thing I definitely don't like is the way page types are handled. In the dashboard there is list of page types with thumbnail images to help distinguish one from the another. Well these images come from either the core or an uploaded File Set. The list of page types available, along with the thumbnail images, are completely separate from the theme files. The result is that you think you're changing the page type, but if the current theme doesn't have a template to match that page type, nothing happens. It's all very confusing.
The page type thumbnails should be associated with themes. A particular page type should only be selectable if a page template file of the same name is available.
The downside to this is that the dashboard would have to do some extra work when displaying page type choices. Also, after switching themes, the dashboard would need to indicate that a specific page did not have a "valid" page type assigned from new theme, and the default page type would be used.
Display Order of Database Backup Files
This isn't a bug just a nit-pick. The admin pages have a database backup utility. You click a button and the database is dumped to a sql file on the server. The new backup file it then added to a list of all backup files on the server. The list displays the date of the backup along with the filename. There are buttons to Restore or Delete.
For example,
| Date | Filename |
|---|---|
| 1-14-2010 09:33 | dbu_1263483189.sql |
| 10-3-2009 10:08 | dbu_1254582536.sql |
| 10-10-2009 22:05 | dbu_1255230327.sql |
| 10-10-2009 10:19 | dbu_1255187959.sql |
Now for the nit-pick. There is no obvious order to the list of files. It's not in date order, or alphabetically by filename (which would also be date order). It's actually alphabetical by date string. That's kind of odd. The result is that it is difficult to quickly see which files are the oldest, making it a little tricky to find and delete the oldest backups.