Important CMS Features

[Chris]

I plan on writing an article on features to code into your CMS, or features to look for in a CMS application.

So far I've got:

SE Friendly URLs
Pagination w/ meaningful identifiers
Unique Title/Meta Data for each page/article
Ad placement flexibility/placement within content
Easy link annotation (like Adsense here on the forums)
Community integration -- allow comments to be added to articles
Limit on bloatware/clean code
link handling (rel=nofollow or redirect scripts)

Anyone think of anything else?

[vahsi000]

it definately has to be user-friendly, it should come along with plenty of help files. For example, I personally don't know much about CMS application. If I were to look for a CMS i'd definately want one that's easy to set up.

[Chris]

That certainly is true for buying one... not really if you're building yourself though.

[Kings]

Things I'd look for as well:

- Rich text editor functionality (WYSIWYG)
- Article categories
- The ability to create additional 'non-article' pages (like WP has)
- Spam control on comments
- File uploads, especially important for screenshots in articles
- Some sort of inbuilt traffic stats (e.g. popularity of each article)

[agua]

Not sure if this applies here - but great from a designers POV :p : having a feature where you can apply different templates to different sections/categories

[cameron]

Chris, are you going to do this article? I'm interested in reading it.

[Emancipator]

from my stand point the #1 thing that I find the most usefull in my custom CMS is the ability to post up blog entries or news with minimal effort, and maximum impact. IE video, flash, categories, etc, without spending more then 10 mins doing it. SO I guess EASE of use is essential is what im saying :)