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 -

• Content Creation
• Content Management Proper
• Content Delivery

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

2. Content Creation (Acquisition, Aggregation, Authoring)

• Acquisition
  • Native support for filetypes
  • Multiple file transfers (FTP, site import)
  • Migration Tools (from another CMS)
  • Conversion tools (e.g.,Word to XML "chunks")
  • Rights management
  • Mandatory metadata tagging (force structure and semantics)
  • RDF ontology support (e.g., Dublin Core)
• Aggregation
  • Incoming syndication feeds
  • Metadata management (read incoming metadata)
  • Integrated Web Services (e.g., currency conversion)
  • UDDI tools
• Authoring (Editing, Templating, Tagging Tools)
  • Content Element Editors (Naive and Power Users)
    • WYSIWYG Through-The-Web Editor
    • Source Editor
    • Structured Fields Editor
    • XML Editor
    • Spell checker
    • Content objects use templates
    • Media asset repository (images, sounds, Flash, video, etc.)
  • Template Editor
    • WYSIWYG Through-The-Web
    • Template Gallery
    • XML Editor
  • Tag Editor (semantics and style)
    • Drop-down menus of all tags
    • Metadata Thesaurus
    • Taxonomies/Ontologies online
  • Help online
    • Context-sensitive help
    • Documentation
    • Examples

3. Content Management Proper (Workflow, Editing, Approvals, Staging, Repository, etc.)

• 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
    • Open page on web (Edit this page)
    • Automatic file lock on open
    • Conflict Resolution (who has it?)
    • Instant Messaging (email, phones)
    • Merge Tools, Diff Tools
  • 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
  • Scheduling, Expiration
  • All elements, templates date/time stamped
  • Archive with rollback (per file or site?)
• Personalization
  • Identity Management
  • Relationship Management (History)
  • Actions tracking
  • Session/Click/Behavior analysis
• Localization
  • Multilingual server
    • Respond to browser language requests
    • Gist translation option
  • Workflow
    • Automatic notifications
    • Quality checkers
  • UI multilingual
• 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
  • Onsite and offsite
  • Files and database
  • To nonvolatile media
  • Disaster recovery plan
• Security
  • Firewall rules
  • Encrypted sessions
• Staging Server for QA
  • Testing methodology
  • Replicates publishing environment

4. Content Delivery (Live Server, Publishing, Syndication)

• Publishing (Delivery)
  • Separate Delivery from Creation/Staging/Testing
    • Use different server platform?
    • Replication
    • Synchronization of mirror sites
  • Multi-channel Publishing to different clients
    • PDAs
    • Cell phones
    • Handicap accessibility
• Syndication
  • RDF and RSS Syndicated News Feeds
  • Web services

5. Lifecycle enhancements (Apply to all three stages above)

• Security
  • Audit Trails
  • Users
  • System
  • Network
• Business Rules
  • Records Policy
  • Privacy Policy
• Integration
  • Single Source Of Truth (Single Sign On, Single Authentication)
  • Enterprise portal
  • Legacy database reuse
  • Data warehousing
• Metadata management
  • Digital rights management
  • Business process management
• Associations
  • Hierarchy, taxonomy
  • Index
  • Cross reference
• Analysis
  • Analytic tools
  • Pattern recognition
• Search and Locate