Headspace Design

10 criteria for selecting a CMS

Posted On April 2nd, 2009 Author Kyle Racki  Filed Under External Articles, Business, Development   3

View the original post here: 10 criteria for selecting a CMS

I like all of Paul’s choices for the post, including:

Multi site support

We’ve had a few instances come up where our clients have multiple websites all running off the same server. In these case, having a CMS that let’s you edit content across multiple sites from the same admin login is invaluable.

Roles and permissions

Whenever I set up a website for clients to edit themselves, there’s always some work involved in making it a pleasant experience for them. With different levels of permission, I make sure that while my Super Admin account has all of the bells and whistles that I need for development, the client’s account is significantly simplifed to make it easy for them, and also avoid the chances of them accidentally deleting everything!

User interaction

Modern sites almost always require some sort of user interaction, whether it’s filling out a contact form or adding a comment to a blog. How easy does the CMS make it to gather, store and view the data?

Managing assets

In many cases, clients need to upload images, PDF, and video files through their site. How easy is it for them to store and use the content?

These are all great points Paul made, but I have two more of my own I’d like to make:

Markup generated

Something I hate about many CMS’s is the HTML they generate. It’s frustrating to design and develop a standards based site with clean, semantic markup, only to have a content management system to spit out nested div tags with unintelligible class names like “node-21”. This sometimes can mean that your design is dictated, not by user testing or skilled designers, but the back-end code that makes the content editable.

Wake up CMS developers! The CMS should just control what flows out of the database, not what the users sees and interacts with. This is one of the reasons we love Wordpress and ExpressionEngine. Utilizing their powerful loop, it generates data and let’s you wrap it in any sort of markup you want.

Open Source vs Proprietary

This is a controversial topic, but the bottom line is this: Open source CMS’s are free to download and use, built by a community of developers. The downside is that if the CMS doesn’t have a large following, there is no one to support it, and also you don’t have a tech support phone number to call if you need help.

On the other hand, proprietary CMS’s are developed and owned by a commercial company. Some like this option because they can speak directly to the company for support and to feel taken care of. However in many cases, there is the risk of the company going under, in which case, you have to rebuild your site if you want upgrades. Also, I find that proprietary systems are more limiting than open source, simply from the fact that open source projects are built by a large community, and companies are limited to their staff.

What about you, do you have any other factors to consider when choosing a CMS?