CMS features checklist for news and article publishers

Feature lists on vendor sites are written to impress, not to help you decide. A publisher needs a short list of capabilities that decide whether a team of writers and editors can work safely, whether articles can be found, and whether the site survives a traffic spike. This checklist is built for that. Use it as a scoring sheet when you compare systems, and pair it with a trial so you test the features rather than read about them.

Where we cite how a search engine or a product behaves, the source is recorded on this page. Where we describe what a good CMS should do, that is editorial judgement, not a measurement.

What should an editorial workflow include?

News publishing is a team activity with a legal and reputational risk attached, so permissions matter more than they do on a brochure site. At minimum you want separate roles for writers, editors and administrators, a state for “draft”, “in review” and “published”, and the ability to stop a writer publishing without approval. Some newsrooms also need a “trusted writer” tier that can publish directly.

Look for per-section permissions (a sport editor should not edit the politics section), an audit trail of who changed what, and comments or notes inside the editor. Systems without these usually push you towards sharing one login, which destroys accountability.

Revisions, scheduling and corrections

Revision history lets an editor see what changed and restore an earlier version. For news it also supports corrections: you can show what was wrong and when it changed. Check how many revisions are kept, whether they cover headline, body and metadata, and whether a revision can be compared side by side.

Scheduling should cover both publishing and unpublishing, in the timezone of your newsroom. Test what happens to a scheduled article if the site is under maintenance when its time arrives.

SEO controls that matter

Good SEO support is mostly about control and clean output, not a magic score. You should be able to edit the page title, meta description, URL slug and canonical URL for each article, set noindex on a page, and generate an XML sitemap automatically. Redirect management is essential for a publisher, because headlines and sections change and old links must keep working.

Google documents Article structured data for news, blog and sports article pages, listing headline, image, datePublished, dateModified and author among the recommended properties. If your CMS can emit these from the fields your editors already fill in, you avoid maintaining the markup by hand. See our notes on choosing software for how this fits into a wider evaluation.

News publishers submitting to Google News also need to know the limits on news sitemaps: Google says to include only articles created in the last two days and allows up to 1,000 news tags per sitemap. A CMS should either generate this file or let you build it without a custom plugin.

Feeds, syndication and distribution

An RSS or Atom feed per site, section and author lets readers, aggregators and partners follow your work without scraping it. Check that feeds include full or summary text as you choose, correct dates, and images. Also ask whether the CMS can produce a newsletter-ready export or integrate with an email service, since many publishers rely on the inbox as much as on search.

Media handling

Articles live or die on images. Ask about automatic resizing to several widths, modern image formats, alt text fields that editors are prompted to complete, captions and credits stored as structured data, and focal-point cropping. For video and audio, check whether you can embed from a hosting service and whether files are served from a CDN.

Multilingual and regional publishing

If you publish in more than one language, decide whether the CMS has translation built in or relies on an extension. Google’s guidance is that each language version should list itself and every other version in hreflang annotations, and that the tags are ignored if two pages do not point to each other. A CMS that generates reciprocal annotations automatically removes a common source of errors.

Performance and hosting

Ask how pages are cached, whether the CMS supports full-page caching or static output, and how it behaves when a story goes viral. A slow admin area is a cost too, because editors lose time. See the cost guide for how hosting choices change the bill.

APIs and integration

A documented API lets you connect the CMS to apps, newsletters, analytics and internal tools. The WordPress REST API, for example, is described as an interface for applications to send and receive data as JSON objects. Whatever the platform, check authentication options, rate limits, whether drafts can be read through the API, and whether the API covers users and media as well as posts.

Membership, subscriptions and paywalls

If you charge readers, you need user accounts, payment integration, content gating by plan, and markup that tells search engines which part is paywalled. Google’s documentation uses the isAccessibleForFree, hasPart and cssSelector properties for this and notes that doing so helps distinguish a paywall from cloaking. Ask the vendor whether their gating produces this markup or whether you must add it yourself.

The checklist

How to use the checklist

Score each row as required, useful or irrelevant before you look at any product. Requirements that only one vendor meets should be checked twice, since they may reflect a lock-in you will regret. Then ask each vendor to demonstrate the required rows live. The licensing guide explains what you can legally do with the code once you have chosen, and the self-hosting guide covers the work of running it yourself.

One last point: do not buy features you will not staff. A scheduling calendar nobody maintains and a multilingual setup with no translators both add complexity without value.