5.2 has been officially released, no more "release candidate."

We've landed two large projects that will improve concrete5 in dramatic ways. First, we're helping a very excellent creative agency build a big site for a major organization, and it involves a complete overhaul of the file system and asset manager. This is wonderful stuff. This means no more single directory with timestamp prefixes on files, but rather a well thought out system with versions, permissions, meta data all sorts of nice stuff.

Second, we're building a major ecommerce implementation for a fun children's book publisher that integrates concrete5 with Magento Commerce. Both are very powerful applications for what they do, and should behave well as one product in the future.

We're also releasing some more add-ons to the marketplace, starting with the ad block today and with the calendar block right around the corner. The forums are going to be heading out to our beta team & user groups shortly progress is being made on all fronts.

All of this means we're quite busy, bringing on more help, and generally loving where we are with concrete5! We have to scale back our already limited involvement in the day-to-day postings of the forum. Andrew and I are going to try to get through all un-answered threads once a week if we can, but you're going to have to continue to rely on the community experts that have already started to answer most stuff in there. If you would like an "official" view on something in a timely fashion, I would strongly encourage you to evaluate the worth of concrete5 to your business and join our Partnership Programs, where we promise your issue attention within 48 hours, typically 8.

So I hope you're all having a great start of '09 so far it's clearly going to be a very exciting year.