Most Important Features for a CMS [closed]

Question

Suppose someone is building you a CMS (Content Management System) from scratch. What are the most important features to include and why?

Answer 1

• security - OWASP Top 10
• user management & user roles
• action and view permissions
• content versioning and audit
• some form of workflow and notifications
• i18n support on literals and object versions
• normalized database schema design
• some form of content import-export
• assets management and thumbnail generation for uploads
• Valid XHTML (compressed with GZIP)
• Rich text editing (e.g FCKeditor) which generates accessible markup
• Valid and minified CSS and javascript (e.g using YUI)
• automatically generated sitemaps.org document
• integration with Google Analytics
• automatic RSS feeds
• open search support
• print css and/or print versions of content
• SEO consideration for duplicate content (e.g use of canonical tag)

Answer 2

I think from a developer's perspective it would be an open modular architecture. IMHO there are always things to add which the CMS platform isn't providing out of the box. Also, it should be database-based.

Existing modules should cover the most important tasks: news, contacts, documents, forums, shop, survey, events, image gallery, navigation, links, fulltext-search, login, newsletter, etc.

From the user's perspective I think that the content editor (WYSIWYG) is the most important piece. The ability to edit inside the "live" page is a great feature. Upload of images with automated resizing and the upload of files should be easy.

The existence of page/control and website templates is also very helpful when you're starting with a CMS. Versioning of documents/pages is also a often required feature and a work-flow engine, where there are authors who create content and editors who are allowed to unlock it.

RSS syndication is another important feature that should be available in a modern CMS.

For international site it very important that the CMS had some sort of built-in multi-lingual support.

Then I think a good CMS nowadays must provide tools for Search Enginge Optimization, e.g. there must be a way to define and insert search engine friendly URLs.