concrete5 has very strong community base in Japan. It’s because there are a number of people who believe in open source, and concrete5 Japan was able to organize the strong user base.

Recently, concrete5 Japan is trying to bridge the language barrier of marketplace, and succeeded in releasing a free theme, “Stucco” and a free add-on “Manual Nav” on the concrete5 marketplace.

A free theme “Stucco” is now available

With the help of community, Stucco theme is now available as one of the few free theme on concrete5 marketplace.

 https://www.concrete5.org/marketplace/themes/stucco/

A free quality theme for all concrete5 users

Shinichi Nakane (nipper), a long-time designer & concrete5 enthusiast from Kobe, Japan, didn’t feel good that there was not enough free theme available on the concrete5 marketplace. Therefore, he decided make one for it.

In fact, during approval process, a several peer-review-board members suggested Nakane to sell Stucco instead of making it for free because of its quality.

Nakane was also the author of concrete5 Japan official guide book and made the sample demo data for the book.

Stucco has very simple and slick look with a couple custom templates and original blocks.

Moreover, the theme was built based on Elemental theme, a default theme. It means that Stucco’s area structure is almost identical to Elemental area structure. If you are one of the site owners who had to build a site with Elemental because there was not enough choice, you could easily switch to Stucco with small amount of adjustment.

There are a few changes from Elemental theme such as top page, additional main area, and some global areas. Please visit its documentation and instruction pages for the detail.

 

Bridge the language barrier with community power

There are many talented designers and developers in Japan. However, they are just known only in Japan because of the language barrier.

It was such a waste of talent. Therefore, I, Katz Ueno, have tried to fill the language barrier as much as possible with community.

Thanks to the peer-review-board members, such as JohnTheFish, I was nominated to one of the PRB admin to help assist those of whom want to submit their themes and add-ons to the marketplace. I wanted to be the one who remove the boundaries as much as possible.

Through the Stucco approval process, I helped Nakane translate his marketplace documentation and help translate some of the PRB member’s comment to assist the approval process.

After this theme submission, I hope Nakane will make more themes and lead the concrete5 community to the better place.

 

In addition to the designers and developers, Japanese users are having hard time using the marketplace because of the language barriers.

I’ve made a couple YouTube movie tutorials to instruct how to user marketplace and some of the add-ons in Japanese at concrete5 Japan website. I’ll continue to make those tutorial videos.

Also, I encourage Nakane to have Japanese documentation on the Stucco’s marketplace page. So that Japanese users feel comfortable using his theme.

 

A free add-on “Manual Nav” is the truly community add-on

https://www.concrete5.org/marketplace/addons/manual-nav1

https://github.com/concrete5japan/manual-nav

concrete5 Japan user group has recently released an add-on, called Manual Nav, which is the concrete5.7 version of Jordan Lev’s famous Manual Nav but developed independently by concrete5 Japan community.

concrete5 Japan community loved Jordan Lev’s Manual Nav very much. When we heard that Jordan didn’t have time to make 5.7 version at that time, we volunteered to make one for 5.7.

acliss19xx was in charge of programming. I was contacting Jordan, functioned as project manager and help documentation in both English and Japanese. Tomoaki Watanabe designed the icon.

It was a true collaboration among concrete5 Japan community without the borders of companies and organization we belong to.

Hopefully, in the future, we can collaborate with the people all over the world.

 

concrete5 Japan community on-going projects

Not only Stucco and Manual Nav, concrete5 Japan have a several on-going community base projects.

 

concrete5 free base theme project, “Sakan”

https://github.com/concrete5japan/sakan

https://www.facebook.com/groups/concrete5package/

Sakan means plasterer in Japanese, who sometime use concrete to decorate building interior.

The purpose of Sakan is the “base theme” specialized for Japanese fonts and language.

A group of Japanese web designer all over Japan came and gather to make the very basic concrete5 theme to share the knowledge of how to make concrete5 package theme with sample content data.

Then, each web designer will add his/her own modification and create their own concrete5 theme.

The unfinished version is already available on GitHub. We’re still working via Facebook Group. We are planning to submit this theme to the marketplace.

 

A Plain Bootstrap Theme Project

https://github.com/playamp1/bootstraptheme

Currently available as /application/theme concrete5 theme on GitHub. Bootstrap Theme project is to make a very simple plain Bootstrap base theme for concrete5 so that the people can easily add the modification to it.

This project is making progress via concrete5 Japan’s weekly live streaming program, “Weekly concrete5” on Ustream.

Through the live streaming program, we share Japanese users how to make a cocnrete5 package and submit to the marketplace.

 

Kazu’s concrete5 Theme Project

 

Kazu from Kyoto, Japan is the web designer and wants to make and sell a theme at concrete5 marketplace. But he has never touched CMS, even WordPress!

This is another long-term project of “Weekly concrete5” to teach and learn how to make a theme from HTML, design a blocks, make it into the package, and submit to the marketplace.

 

Let’s share the knowledge and help grow concrete5 ecosystem

Stucco and Manual Nav were released as free add-on and themes. If you appreciate what we do, please help encourage concrete5 ecosystem!

• Download and use these add-ons
• If you have any comments and feedback, please feel free to give them feedbacks.
• If you love them, please help promote these packages
• Try purchasing paid add-ons and themes, if you have never done so
• Try making your own add-on or theme
• If you want customize, place an order to the author!

concrete5 Japan community is hoping to grow the concrete5 ecosystem with the rest of the world!