The selection process

1. Gather a team
Gather a small internal CMS review team with key stakeholders. Include people that will actually use the system once implemented. This will greatly improve adoption. Also ensure senior management sponsorship. Good for budget and getting decisions. The best way to do this is to create a user reference group to work on the content and a steering committee to make decisions.

2. Identify requirements
Identify the requirements that are most important for your situation and which ones are knock out criteria for you. Do not add requirements that are not important to you, as it will only make selection more difficult. Also consider the budget, including initial purchase, implementation and running costs.

3. Shortlist 5-7 CMS solutions
Gauge the requirements with the use of resources like CMS matrix, desk research or sending a RFI (request for information) to the suppliers. Review industry resources and reviews based on your unique criteria. Keep in mind you will receive a large amount of information and each question asked will add to that. In any case start with your knock out criteria first to slim down the list and then move towards the other requirements.

4. Do additional research and narrow down to 2-3 solutions
Ask follow up questions to external resources like LinkedIn and talk to people who use those solutions. Ask the suppliers on the shortlist for a RFP (request for proposal) and have them include not only the system but also underlying hardware, implementation and maintenance.

5. Have demos and hands on testing
Until this phase most has been ‘on paper’. Now it is time to get to see the solutions in action. Make your own script with what you want to see so you do not get the standard sales pitch but really get to see what you would get. Hands on testing would be an option too but is more work and chances are you do not get to see the best of the system since you are untrained.

At this point you should be able to select a preferred system. Inform the vendors whom you prefer but keep them on the line until you reach an agreement with the preferred one.

Tips

Make certain you get the whole picture from the vendors at the time of RFP and/or evaluation and that what is showed is actually available and not “vapor-ware” that has yet to see the light of day.

Do not forget to look at the user interface of the systems, as this may have large impact on ease of use and adoption. Do this in the shortlist phase already and do not wait until you get the demos.

Content need to be protected with integrated real-time rights management with distributed content management, and with tracking.

Nothing beats a simple comparison chart of the various features and functionalities offered by the varied CMS tools available in the market.

In the demos encourage your team to beat up the CMS products. Make it part of their regular workday.

Decide what level of control is granted to local users and how much content translation should be facilitated by the CMS.

Decide if all sites fit into a single CMS paradigm, or if you need several different point systems

Decide what level of IT overhead you want to take on/support centrally and at the team level.

Resources

CMSWatch
CMSWire
ZDNet
Forrester
Gartner
CMS matrix
How to choose open source CMS

Experts

Seth Gottlieb (Also sells reports on systems)
Brice Dunwoodie
Marco Langenhuizen
Enilon Group

SaaS solutions

Clickability Platform.

Features

Functional

AJAX features ∗ Archiving capabilities ∗ Authorization mechanisms, role based access control ∗ Availability in multiple languages for administration ∗ Content to be managed (pages, objects) ∗ Ease of use ∗ Easy template design ∗ i18N (internationalization) and L10N (localization) ∗ Integration adapters ∗ Integration with MS-Office Suite ∗ Massive import ∗ Multi channel delivery ∗ Multimedia encoding support ∗ Preview functionality ∗ Publishing scheduling ∗ Rich authoring ∗ Search ∗ Translation management ∗ Workflows (series, parallel and a combination of both) ∗ Metadata and taxonomy

Management

Availability of support ∗ Market penetration ∗ Total Cost of Ownership (software, hardware, maintenance, etc.)

Technical

Ease of maintenance ∗ Easy CDN integration (like Akamai caching) ∗ Integration with system monitoring tools ∗ LDAP and active directory integration ∗ Legacy application integration needs ∗ Path to upgrade ∗ Performance ∗ Required (level of) integration with other systems ∗ Robust, up-to-date and standardized code ∗ Scalability ∗ Standards compliance ∗ Traffic scale and delivery model (static, dynamic, hybrid) ∗ User load ∗ Administrative flexibility

I have received a lot of traffic on my article about Wordpress as CMS lately and thought it would be nice to release a new CMS theme. It’s extremely easy to use and available for download now

Tips for using

• Use pages for CMS content
• Create a page named Home with page order 0
• Create a page named Blog and assign the Blog template to it
• Set Home as front page and Blog as posts page
• It supports sub-pages, only shown when the parent is selected

In one of my previous posts I wrote about using Wordpress as a CMS. To demonstrate the capabilities I created this “Wordpress CMS theme”. It features a static frontpage with news, post and page searching, a weblog with widget support and easy access for non-technical authors. The theme can also be used as theme for a weblog.

Download it here (108KB). Version 2.1 is tested for Wordpress 2.1.x, valid XHTML and almost valid CSS (except for the two IE hacks).

Using Wordpress as CMS is much more simple as of version 2.1. It only takes five simple steps to do it, without the need to hack into complicated code.

1. Create a page named home as startpage and give it page order 0.
2. On the top of index.php add (between php tags) /* Template Name: weblog */ .
3. Create an empty page named weblog, give it page order 99 and assign the weblog template to it.
4. In the admin section under options > reading, select home as front page and weblog as posts page.
5. Create a menu with wp_list_pages(’sort_column=menu_order&title_li=’). (Already taken care of in the CMS theme).

Use pages for your CMS content and make sure the page order is between 0 and 99. This way the first page in the menu is home and the last page is the weblog. Of course you can vary if you want.

Download the original CMS theme or the new CMS theme and optionally use a plugin to make the pages searchable.