Dear Dave,
So I'm sitting here thoughtfully chewing a cheese and tomato roll and one word is solidifying in the front of my mind... Strategy. With this in mind, we could set out what a top ten would be for the people intended to use the end product. Then we could add a top five that all our people would see as absolutely necessary for the future. But it all depends on what we want to do down the road, which means - you guessed it - a strategy is key.
For example, perhaps we could build this CMS thing by doing this: first we build a simple version - it's easy to install, easy to set up, and darn pretty! We actively grow a user base for this version. A good mini website would help, with documentation. And pictures! And a person we can email
perhaps a forum. Then, when we've grown the base of people using it - built up a community of users and testers - we move into making CMS Lite into a Delight version.
Now, when I say a user base I don't mean people that we sell our services to, and sites we make for them on their behalf! No! I mean we set up a situation where people come to us and download the product and install and configure it by themselves. More power to the people!
What kind of 'first stage' person would want to play with and stay with a CMS? I think we can learn lessons from the PHPnuke/Postnuke communities here. Overwhelmingly, what they want is:
Something easy to install
Something instantly intuitive to use - good user interface
Something that they can make look like 'their site' within a few minutes
A community based web toolkit should really look at the latest killer techniques in building communities online. Which is why I'd say that in this strategy what we might want to do is build in a way to take content from other people's sites, just as you can with most blogs these days. Let's use the most successful part of the blogging phenomenon and build it into the basic product - keeping our sites firmly set building a user base.
So I think that the initial emphasis really has a strong visual element. The user interface has to be great - extremely clean, pretty and intuitive. And to make a site 'theirs' in minutes, we're going to need to look at creating skins and setting up the visual look of a site design through the web. (By that I mean the design as in the way it looks - colours, headings, font sizes, position of pictures on the page etc.)
