Content Management System Feature list
The Features are listed by common content management roles:
Users (content authors)
Administrators
Developers
Technology
Users (content authors)
You deal with the system from the perspective of a typical creator of content - you are in charge of public relations, you are in marketing, a journalist, an author, a secretary, etc.
Your Tasks: writing articles, providing images and multimedia content formats like video and sound files. In short, you are producing and managing what the website will have to offer to the audience.
Platform independent, publish everywhere: The website can be edited through any computer connected to the internet with a current web browser - wherever you are, no other software needed.
A Rich Text Editor (RTE) allows users to format text, insert images and create internal and external links just like in Word or any other word processor.
Text formatting is foolproof. Your work will always match the basic design settings of the page. Therefore visual integrity is ensured while authoring articles.
Automatic management of images, ensuring correct size and quality for the web.. “Magic image” technology in the RTE ensures full quality control of proportions and size.
The fast backend interface works in any modern web browser, is highly streamlined and fully customizable for any extensions. Reuse of components and consistency of concepts within makes the backend easy to navigate and understand.
The division into primary and secondary form fields allows the user to see only the most frequently used input options, while advanced options are normally hidden and displayed on demand.
The well known copy/cut/paste concept is used with the internal clipboard to manage rearrangement of all internal objects. For repositioning of pages and content elements, wizards are available to do the job even easier!
A context sensitive menu gives users direct access to the most popular functions of an object with a single click on it's icon. This saves time and spares hands and wrists of users operating a mouse daily.
Repetitive operations and frequently used internal modules can be captured as a shortcut in a single click. Having a collection of shortcuts, users can jump around inside the administration interface in no time at all. Shortcuts can be grouped, named and even imposed by administrators upon user groups.
Links are applied with extreme ease. Insures that there are no "broken" or "dead" links within the system.
Wizards for making tables, bullet lists, mail forms, etc.
All kinds of content types may be added through easy to understand forms. No technical limit to the amount of items accomodated by the content structure per site, per category or per page.
Pages are arranged in a clear hierarchic tree structure well known by any computer user from the local computer filesystem with folders and files.
The internal filemanager allows users to upload, rename, copy, move, delete and even edit files online. Backend users and groups can be assigned private home-directories on the server. Any filepath on the server - internally or reachable from the internet - can be accessed.
Any level of pages can be loaded into an editing form specifying parameters like name, date online/offline, etc. to be edited at the same time!
Each page content item, not just the complete page or a branch can be kept in an offline state until finished and then be published by one single click.
Hidden, time- or access restricted content can be easily previewed in it's real environment.
The backend interface offers context sensitive help from small icons.
Pages and page content as well as news items can be set to automatically go on and offline.
MS Word documents - or other rich text content from client applications or the web - can easily be imported by simple copy-paste.
All of the changes to a document are recorded in a version management system. There is an infinite undo option within a complete and legible view of the documents version history.
Through PHP, user logins and the unique speed-optimized integration of dynamic content, you can personalize the web experience for the visitors to the website.
Many default plugins are available such as forums, calendars, guestbooks, sitemaps, banner-controls, email-forms, polls, ratings, faqs, glossaries, news, and online shop systems.
A Direct Mail system is able to send highly personalized emails to newletter subscribers. A unique filtering technology allows a batch of thousands of rich media emails to be customized in one billion combinations and tagged with personal recipient information. Response-tracking gives a detailed image of campaign success.
Indexed full text search in local pages and external media files like TXT, HTML, MS Word and PDF-files. Includes advanced options for searching only parts of a website and intelligent relevance rated display of results. Direct search in SQL database tables is of course possible as well.
All contents can be edited through the website itself even more intuitively. Simply click on the content you want to edit while browsing the pages. An administration panel is available for the user on the frontend webpage. This allows users to edit, move objects, delete or hide pages, manage lists of database records directly and intuitively on the webpage. A technology closely resembling the award winning “SmartEdit” technology known from RedDot CMS.
WYSIWYG editing (visual editing), frontend editing, table and form wizards, automatic image handling, generation of graphics on-the-fly - these features make any average PC user an effective content author in seconds.
Content bypasses typical bottlenecks of licenced software and single access. Any number of editors can be enabled to create the website!
Administrators
You are the superuser who is approaching the system from a daily management perspective, who creates users, assigns responsibilities, creates and supervises workflows. You are also in charge of the webserver and the technical infrastructure and security.
Ready-to-run defaults combined with an extreme level of customizing options (defined in Script syntax) provide the possibility to fine tune the backend authoring environment for every user or whole groups and subgroups.
Access control of pages is available on user, owner and group scheme (similar to UNIX). Additional security provided by locking users to certain mountpoints in the page tree.
Authorize backend users and groups to access and edit only certain objects and modules in certain sections of the website. Simple or complex roles can be assigned to users. An overview tool makes it easy to analyse the permissions of a large amounts of users. The systems scales from a handfull to thousands of users and groups with ease.
Statistics are available ranging from simple internal hit-counters to advanced analysis of standard or extended logfiles. Furthermore, page impressions made by previews from staff members can be excluded, so only true page hits from customers are written to logfiles: You get a precise picture of your success on the web.
A straight line workflow engine makes production and approval of content a breeze in a workgroup of authors, editors and reviewers.
Simultaneous editing and potential loss of work is prevented since a warning sign is displayed to users trying to access a record already opened. To administrators, the time since the record has been accessed and the user name is visible.
A powerful Task Center provides administrators, authors and editors with a To-Do list, messaging system, notepad, and shortcuts to recently processed objects.
All backend activitites are logged and changes can be monitored, tracked and rolled back. This prevents accidental loss of information.
Sub-version control - called “history” - allows an unlimited levels of undo for all objects. Also, offers "difference" analysis between current and previous states of an object allows reviewers or editors to quickly identify changes in objects through the workflow process.
Acts like an advanced database manager with a high-level frontend for manipulating database content. Another popular PHP-application, the database manager phpMyAdmin, has been integrated and preconfigured with the current database. Automatically handles the access to phpMyAdmin. With phpMyAdmin administrators, are allowed to do really low level operation of the database.
Demanding processes such as generation of menus and image scaling is done only once due to the caching capabilities. Calculations are made on the first request and subsequently served from the internal cache.
Can be configured to be used in a Live-/Production Server Environment dividing the Production Server from the Webserver for maximum security and webserver performance.
Developers
You are the initial creators of the website and the wizards. Typically, this task is performed by a web agency who designs, planns and implements the Content Management solution. You expect powerful creation and management of the website on a metalevel and complete division of content and structure/design.
Provide intranets, extranets and password protected sections of the website. Utilize security features such as IP filtering. Access is controlled by users and groups and can be restricted on both page and single object levels. Furthermore can run under SSL, different ports than port 80 and from alternative admin-directories if you are very paranoid.
Meta data such as description and keywords can be entered generally for a template and for individual pages. Further meta data can easily be applied through custom extensions to any object in the system.
Publish any mixture of static HTML (for speed), dynamic content (for database interaction) or a truely mix of dynamic and cached content for the best of both.
Compatible with all search engines (webcrawlers) - all pages will be indexed (software requirements apply).
Template engine allows for browser detection, printable versions, versions for PDAs etc., use of CSS stylesheets, WML for mobile phones, XML for data exchange, SGML for print.
All changes can be tracked throughout the complete development phase. You can always view changes and go back.
Can coexist with static HTML-files you can settle for a gradual conversion from static to a dynamic site. You don't have to complete such a migration if you prefer certain sections being static.
Technology
Requires no special software installed for users. All modern graphical browser can be used. Internet Explorer 5+ is recommended though.
Based on the extremely popular and fast PHP4 scripting language combined with MySQL.
Storage of content is done in a very fast relational database. See http://www.mysql.org/ for benchmark information.
Secure file downloads can be configured. Password submission and storage (backend) is md5-encrypted. IP-filtering can be applied for intranets, extranets and administration sections. Multi-state login-notification by email provides effective “burglar alarm”. True encryption of data-transfer available through standard webserver Secure Socket Layer (SSL).