CMS or Content Management Systems is an very efficient tool to maintain and manage websites and the content thereof. But how well a CMS caters to your requirements depends a great deal on your choice of the same. While choosing a CMS solution for your website, there are some key features you should look out for. However, before you start selecting a CMS solution for your website, you should have a clear idea about your requirements and basic functionality features that you want it to have. Here are some key features you need to look for.

Basic Functionality

The content management system should be able to perform basic function like creating, deleting, editing and organizing web pages. There are certain simple CMS solutions that allow creation of content but organize the same as per default settings. Make sure you check about this feature if want to have total control over the contents of your web pages. Though you may feel that you don't need the organizing features right now, you cannot be sure that you wouldn't need them in future.

WYSIWYG Editors

The WYSIWYG editors let you add, edit and change the website contents without any knowledge of HTML whatsoever. Moreover, the editors enable you to mark up headings, lists, links and other elements on a web page without providing any specifications about their appearance. Also, the editor should be allowed to handle external assets such as images and downloadable files.

Management

The CMS should enable content providers to manage images and files efficiently. In fact, it should make it mandatory for content providers to add ALT attributes to images. In addition, it should also provide basic editing tools like cropping resizing, rotating etc. apart from all this, another important consideration should be the ability of the CMS to upload and attach PDFs, Word documents and other files and how they are displayed to the website users.

Customization

The CMS should be flexible enough to accommodate your needs and requirements. Rather than following technology as a default setting, it should seek to allow separation of design and content. It should allow flexibility for the data to be retrieved and presented.

User Interaction

The CMS should enable the gathering of user feedback or allow a third party plug-in to do the same. If you have a community or forum on your website, then your CMS should enable provisions for chat, comments, ratings and other user interaction tools. The CMS should enable you to post forms and collect responses. The essential purpose of a CMS is to allow tasks like customization of fields without any technical expertise. Apart from this, the CMS should also provide tools to facilitate communication with the customers.

Different Roles

There may be scenarios when you have multiple content providers for managing the website contents. Thus the CMS should be able to control who can edit what part of the website contents. For example the HR department of the company would need to edit content on the 'Careers' page of the website while the development team would keep track of the 'Portfolio' page. Thus the CMS should support permissions that allow specifications about what users can edit what pages and what sections of the website.