I'm building a CMS

Question

Hi all,
Today I have undertaken the task of building yet another CMS
for Coldfusion which will (when finished) be entirley free to use
for anyone who wants it.
Don't get me wrong, it's not going to compete with the likes
of FarCry etc but will mainly be useful for beginners wanting to
know a bit more about how it is done (think of it as a fully
functional learning tool example app) - as I myself am not exactly
an expert at things (but mapping the features of the CMS we use at
work that was built in house with PHP may help me, as it is an
excellent system).
I would just like people to discuss what it is they'd expect
from a CMS as a bare minimum and what they would find useful
(features etc)?
Thanks,
Mikey.

Answer 1

Thanks for your input james!
So far, I have outlined the following features that will
definitely be included and are indeed already in production.
1 - Unlimited page creation with hierachial structure. e.g. a
page can have children and their pages have children etc.
2 - Publishing of pages where this will have a cascading
effect on it's children to also become unpublished.
3 - Explicit ordering of pages to say what should be at the
top and what should not.
4 - Ability to create "slots" where by the user can insert
content (items from the website) into them. (this becomes useful
for when wanting to create a navigation bar for example) You'll be
able to explicitly choose what goes where in the slot with exact
ordering.
5 - Ability to create custom content types e.g. page, section
form
6 - Ability to then add separate schemas to these content
types. The same schema will also be able to be shared amongst an
unlimited number of content types (schemas are the areas that
contain the fields e.g. page title field, summary, body text,
images etc)
7 - A shared media pool. I was thinking about allowing users
to upload media to specific pages but thought it would make sense
for all files to be in one place and for the page to simply
reference that file chosen. This is good because it means two items
in the website "about us" and "home" for example could share the
same image without having to have it uploaded twice.
8 - Automatic site-map building in hierachial structure from
database.
9 - Automatic breadcrumb building from url.
10 - Option to revoke deleted items (as nothing will ever
actually be deleted, just marked as deleted)
11 - TinyMCE wysiwyg editor option for textareas when built
in the schema fields.
Thats about it for now. And that's alot of work to do! If you
have any more idea let me know or share your thoughts on best
practices.
Many thanks.
Mikey.