What would you want out of a CMS?

[Richard Conyard]

Not meant to be a salesy post this one, actually a genuine query.

We're looking at the sales pitch of Colony and wanting to know which features to emphasise in marketing materials.

Outsite of running in php (can't do that one sorry), what would you guys want? Without sounding like a jack of all trades we've pretty much got the whole package in there. If we haven't got it being modular and the core being extensible it probably wouldn't end up being a large rewrite to tuck it in. What features to market on become difficult when you've too many options :-S

 

[Webstuff]

obvious ones;

news
poll
forums (bah, but yes)
contact us!
page editing/creating
member areas
file management

Ones that I made for myself (diff. CMS ofc)

documents (public, members, groups)
files (public, members, groups)


Having looked at your CMS, I've really been impressed, you've got a great product there. I've got my own CMS (PHP/MySQL/lots of coffee ), and I know what the market's like for CMS's, and yours is certainly worth the price for business / government / generally large websites.

 

[Rob Holmes]

I've got no idea if you offer this but from a business/department point of view..

restricted editing
multilevel access
internal messaging
Cross checking diary system

Rob

 

[Ravenfire]

I would definitely want one that has integration to a decent forum and for me personally I would need one that has the features of mosets tree!

I like the look of your one though and the features

 

[Richard Conyard]

The trouble is picking the right features to concentrate on rather than features. For example:

news
poll
forums (bah, but yes)
contact us!
page editing/creating
member areas
file management
documents (public, members, groups)
files (public, members, groups)

Got all of those

restricted editing
multilevel access
internal messaging

Got those as well, don't know what is meant by cross checking diary system, but as I said it's modular so it's a question of just having a requirement to code it up.

I'd love to be in a position to dedicate time to putting materials together for all the features, and eventually I'll get one of the guys here to do so. Until such times I need to figure out where to concentrate.

 

[Ian Jones]

Nearly all (or possibly all) of the features suggested here are available in the Mambo product which is an open source CMS system. The marketing question that you need to answer is how do you persuade people to buy your product when they can get the excellent product Mambo for free!

I think the area you should concentrate your efforts on is quality documentation backed up by good quality support. As this is an area where Mambo is patchy.


Regards

Ian

www.iljconsulting.co.uk

 

[SuffolkDesigns]

One of the problems I see with CMS such as mambo is that they have become over complicated.

We sell our very basic CMS to clients that want to update content themselves, if they want a forum we will install that seperately for them, the same for other scripts etc.

The reason our clients like this is because it is simple for them to use (MS Word like interface for managing site content), not overloaded with features that most won't use and is highly customisable to work with any site design.

 

[kyber]

In my experience, admittedly focused on larger corporations than you are probably targetting, the major issue for CMS (especially for my most recent experience with a pharmacutical company) is around the publish authority cycle.

By this I mean clear role based responsibilities, workflow through authority to publish, escalation/alerts on delays publishing to deadlines or replacing material going out of date, audit track record of updates, and an ability to show what the content was at any particular date.

Roles may be pool based in that a number of resources may fulfil a particular role.

For example, mutliple contributors and several "editors" that have authority to release a contribution to the site.

A major consideration for many companies once they have got it wrong once is making sure that there is decent management of what is released to a website.

Regards,

Stuart

 

[Richard Conyard]

Mambo looks okay for simple sites, however from a brief flick through and looking at plug-ins/bots it would fall over flat on most of the installs we've got.