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What makes for a good CMS?

6 February 05

First and foremost, sorry for no Lenya article yesterday. The weekend has been too hectic for me to finish writing an article, and the organization of it keeps changing based on everything I have learned about Lenya this past week or so. Watch this space for a new article soon.

For reasons yet to be divulged, I'm interested in hearing from you on what would attract you to using a particular CMS. Here are some things that would interest me:

• Manages content, presentation, business logic, and administration seemlessly without understanding how the application was coded to make it happen.
• For content, create (and edit) new pages with or without a WYSIWYG editor as well as automatically change my editing view based on the page type (static page, blog page, etc.)
• For presentation, ability to edit CSS with textarea form field, but also to create and manage multiple templates for a site. For example, take some hints from Keynote and Pages, where one presentation has multiple design templates that the user can pick and choose.
• For business logic, I'd love to have those who know nothing about HTML or web programming to still be able to create their own forms. How about a way to choose fields that have pre-built data integrity checks, and methods for creating new fields by developers that act as plugins?
• For administration, the obvious adding of users, but maintaining permissions on the site down to a page level as well as by event (certain users that don't belong to a certain group can publish pages, only edit them)

Admittedly, some of these items are being implemented in other CMS's, but I don't think all of them, and definitely not in an easy to use manner. So how about it, what gets you hyped up on a CMS?