Clicks & Notes

Robin Good’s Latest News - A CMS For The Web-Enabled Organization: Marqui CMS Review - Part I Requirements:

A part of his review of the Marqui CMS, Robin Good has compiled a series of requirements checklists for selecting a content management system. Aspects covered include the following:

Content Management Requirements:

• Usability – “The system should not require the study of extensive documentation to understand how to perform basic operations like: creating new content, creating new categories for content, adding images and links, adding new contributors and external authors, validating content awaiting approval for final publication, etc.”
• Version control & archiving
• Workflow
• Security
• Integration with external systems
• Reporting

Publishing Requirements:

• Style sheets
• Page templates
• Extensibility – “The CMS should provide enough flexibility and easy-of-use as to make it extremely simple to integrate code “snippets” to provide additional publishing functionalities.”
• Support for multiple formats – including HTML (Web), PDF, RSS, XML, and text
• Personalization – “The CMS should provide the ability to customize the type of information presented to different types of users based on user profiles, roles and access rights or even based on specific metadata in the source content.”
• Usage statistics

Accessibility Requirements:

• Accessibility – “should be able to conform to one or more accessibility standards such as the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)”
• Cross browser support
• Support for client-side functionality
• Speed
• Valid HTML
• Effective navigation
• Metadata – “should conform to a standard such as Dublin Core”
• Support for multiple languages

Business Requirements:

• Training
• Documentation
• Warranty
• Maintenance agreements
• Resources required – any pre-existing hardware or software that the CMS must interface with, or run on, including specific operating systems, databases, web servers
• Skills required to customize and maintain the system.
• Scalability
• Reference sites – a portfolio of successful implementations where the CMS software has been effectively implemented