My list of what makes a CMS

This is a personal list of items that make a great content management system from a management, design and development perspective. Flexibility, stability, access, development process and management process being key.

Here is the list of advanced features I would put in a system. This doesn’t include the basics as it is a personal list of items for me to expand on later. You can come back for more. I do plan to make my own Open Source CMS one day but not until I have had what I deem enough experience. Three years from now maybe.

This is a personal list of items that make a great content management system from a management, design and development perspective. Flexibility, stability, access, development process and management process being key.

Here is the list of advanced features I would put in a system. This doesn’t include the basics as it is a personal list of items for me to expand on later. You can come back for more. I do plan to make my own Open Source CMS one day but not until I have had what I deem enough experience. Three years from now maybe.

This list doesn’t include some features you would expect because some things are better kept as plugins/modules. This is not my laundry list of wants. This is a list of what a good content management system would have.

The idea was inspired by my bad experiences with WordPress. I love WordPress guys. It is great. But, sometimes we need a fresh start or simply a project to show us how wrong we are.

Features

Content Management

  • Custom content types that can have other content types as children.
  • Multi relational taxonomies that can be used for many content types.
  • Custom fields for content types and taxonomies.
  • Dynamic organization of media content.
  • The ability to group many media files into many groups. Good media grouping.
  • Custom and independent theme menu system

Users

  • Permissions and capabilities for roles and not for users.
  • Multiple roles for users.

Development

  • Site backup extension.
  • Site performance and caching extensions.
  • Command line tool.
  • Cron and admin notification system.
  • Easy querying of content.
  • Localization.
  • Easy one click FTP updating.
  • Modularized automatic updates.

Themes

  • Site themes and child themes.
  • No admin themes but full output filtering.