We welcome criticisms and suggestions. And would greatly appreciate references to other CMS Feature lists. See the
Gilbane Report for an early discussion of this list development, and the
CMSML initiative for current developments.
Note that many technical terms are links that will open a definition in our
glossary of terms.
The CMS Review Feature List is divided into four major areas.
First we need general information about the product (Name, Technology, Price, Market Status). This overview should greatly cut down candidate systems for your consideration.
Then we look at the three phases of Content Management to describe specific features -
1. Product Overview
- Description
- Product Name
- Company Name
- Company/Organization website
- Product web page
- Company's description
- Our Description
- Technology
- License - Open-source, Proprietary, which
- Type - General CMS, Framework, Front end (UI), News Portal, Blog, Wiki
- Platform - Windows, Linux, Mac, etc.
- Web Server - IIS, Apache, etc.
- Application Framework - Perl, Python, .NET, J2EE, PHP, Cold Fusion, etc.
- CMS Framework - AxKit, Cocoon, Midgard, Zope, etc.
- Languages - Perl, VB, Java, PHP, Python, etc.
- Databases - Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, any ODBC, etc.
- API - public to allow extensibility.
- Status
- Release - 2.0, etc.
- Year introduced
- Number of Installs, Downloads
- Developer Community (website?, mail list?)
- Marketing
- Price
- License (per CPU, per user, etc.)
- Market Position (Revenues, Competitors)
- Sales Methods (Sales Force, Online)
- Support Contracts, Consultants
- Online Demos, Sandbox, Trial, Prototype, Proof of Concept
- Installation
- Online How To
- Hours/Days for Typical Install
- Documentation online/printed
- Download site/CD-ROMs
- Code Commented
- Support
- Online Help
- Tutorials
- Training Classes
- Cost
- Commercial Contracts
- Help Desks
- Independent Consultants
- Workflow
- Access Permission Levels (Privilege granularity)
- Number of levels
- Per User, Per Folder, Per Role, Per file, Per Content Element
- Flexible assignments to workflow
- Creator automatic owner of content
- User subscription to workflow
- LDAP Support
- Check In/Check Out
- Workflow Messaging
- Email notifications (links to work)
- Status (stage in workflow)
- Comments at each stage
- Audit trail (workflow log)
- Arbitrary Roles (Writers, Editors, Graphic Artists, Rights Managers, Publishers, etc.)
- Versioning
- Personalization
- Localization
- Reporting
- Chrono workflow and by worker
- WebTrends-style for whole site
- Specific monitors
- Performance (page delivery times)
- Storage
- Format (text, HTML, XML)
- Database only
- Files
- Files and database
- Backup
- Security
- Staging Server for QA
- Testing methodology
- Replicates publishing environment
4. Content Delivery (Live Server, Publishing, Syndication)
5. Lifecycle enhancements (Apply to all three stages above)