CMS Selection Checklist

June 14, 2011 selection

A few days ago, I was asked by a potential client to provide documentation on my CMS selection process. As readers of this blog know, I write a LOT of articles on the various aspects of selecting a content management system. Probably the most concise descriptions are these two: “Selecting a CMS” and “How to Select a CMS.” These posts go pretty deep and I have many other posts that go deeper into the specific activities. But, I still felt like I was missing a nice clean (less bloggy) overview. To solve that problem, I put together this CMS Selection Checklist. The most fun part of writing the checklist was finding all the articles that I wrote over the years that discussed each element of the process. I also see areas where I can write more.

CMS Selection Checklist

Enjoy!

  • http://www.webnodes.com Vidar Langberget

    Very good idea, and I agree with most of it. I don’t agree that the definition of the content types should be a part of the selection process.

    Few normal CMS purchasers are capable of defining their content types in a good way. At least, that’s my experience. Creating a selection process based on a bad content model is not a good idea IMO.

    • seth

      Good point. But I would counter that if you don’t understand your content, you are not in a good position to select a CMS. Some products handle different types of content structures better than others. The example that I like to give is one client had an online quiz. Each quiz had an ordered collection of questions. Each question had a collection of answers. The elegance/ease of editing quizzes varied widely across products that we looked at. Another, more common example: products. I ran across a CMS that didn’t have a numerical attribute type. You had to manage price in a text field. That made things like sorting products by price very difficult because a $10 wanted to be on the cheaper side of the sort than a $9 dollar item.

      You can’t identify these types of gotchas unless you evaluate a CMS based on your content model.

      • http://www.webnodes.com Vidar Langberget

        In my opinion, it would be better to use one or two standard content modeling exercises as the basis for rating the different vendors on their content modeling capabilities.

        I’m fairly certain that a CMS that lacks a numerical property type lacks a lot of other things as well, and I would think that many of those problems would be easier to spot than details in how a CMS does content modeling.