Darren Ferguson - Weblog
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Developer WCM evaluation document
A while back I discussed the desire to have a document that helped me to evaluate a web content management system from a developer perspective. A few other people expressed interest in the idea so I've published a very rough first draft here in case anyone wishes to collaborate or provide any feedback.
The document is intended to be a verbose specification of a simple website to build in the CMS the functionality of which is extremely common to most websites. The exercise itself should take no more than a day and leave a developer with a good feel of how to perform basic tasks such as create content types and templates. The simplicity of the exercise is such that I'd expect any reasonable developer to be able to sit in front of a CMS they'd never used before and hack their way through by Googling and badgering experienced users on the CMS support site.
The feedback I'd like:
- Is there any *essential* website functionality that is missing?
- Is there anything in the document that isn't really in WCM scope?
- Any tips for structuring the document?
- How to get the developer to write up the steps performed so you could browse their evaluations to support your CMS selection.
Feedback via comments or email is very welcome.
Maybe add a couple of those essential SEO bullets?
- You should be able to specify a unique title for each page.
- Ability to make unique meta descriptions for each page.
- URL's shouldn't contain ANY kind of parameters, as these may confuse Googles ability to identify unique content.
Wednesday, September 23, 2009@7:46 PM