The 7 Pillars of CMS

As we’ve established in the previous installments of this series, a CMS is about managing content. Of course, there are several components that are crucial to have in a CMS in order to manage and assist in creating these contents.

1.0. A robust Template editor:

A CMS should provide a visually rich and robust template editor, hence empowers content editors and makes it easier for them to write and present their content.

2.0. Intelligent content editor and assisted image tagging

If you are writing/editing content, you need to add photos/images and tag these images. As a content editor you can either observe the images and tag them yourself, or let an AI framework do the job for you. If you give AI framework a spin, you will find out that sometimes the AI tags relatively interesting parts of the supplied photo/image that you might not have thought to tag. Furthermore, one shouldn't just stop at auto tagging images, probably we could let the AI assist in writing, or even composing the article itself.

3.0. Flexible workflow management:

We have had a quick glimpse at workflows (including a relatively intelligent ones), nevertheless, it is important to stress out how a robust and flexible workflow could assist in making the publication progress less painful for all those who are involved in the publishing process.

4.0. Testing capabilities:

When addressing a segment of customers/society, there is no determined answer whether a certain option/article, etc... will succeed or not. Even sometimes, we might have logical answers from our perspective on how to address customers, however usually testing might reveal completely the opposite of what you think. Hence providing testing tools and frameworks for content editors to use is important (such as A/B testing and multivariate testing).

5.0. Smooth resource and digital assets management:

Content is not only text, it has pictures/photos and videos in order to make a content richer and impactful. Making multimedia management experience better is crucially important for content editor to smooth out the process of publishing and re-visioning.

6.0. Version control

CMS can implement version control in many different ways, yet it is important that any CMS you are using has to have version tracking and rollback. Without version control, it would be quite hard to keep track of content changes where team(s) are collaborating in a production pipeline with a protected repository to avoid accidental content overrides. Version control is essential for digital asset management.

7.0. Personalization

One of the most requested features by salespersons, and it plays a huge rule in web world. Most major websites implement some sort of personalization based on analytics data and even chat-bots in order to fine tune the content to suit visitors' needs.