What to look for in a content management system

If you're looking to upgrade your static website to a content management system, you need to ask yourself a few critical questions as you evaluate your choices. For organizations with limited budgets, we recommend you look at your open source options such as Drupal, WordPress and DotNetNuke. In doing your due diligence, you want to make sure the source code is freely available and that there is a large developer community supporting the software.

Some of the features to consider include friendly URL's, the types of modules that are available, the ability to assign permissions and roles and then group users into role groups, online help and search functionality. In today's Web 2.0 world, you'll want to be able to blog, add in a poll, create a discussion forum, syndicate your content via a RSS feed and integrate with a third party e-newsletter. All of these features help you with your search engine optimization or how you rank on a Google search.  For smaller organizations with no IT staff, you'll want a content management system that allows your non-technical staff to easily update content, create new pages, as well as upload images and graphics.