Section
Guides
How to choose a CMS for a news website: practical guides. How to choose, license, budget for and run a CMS for a news, magazine or article website, written for editors and publishers.
These guides cover the decisions that come before and after you pick a content management system: what features to insist on, what the licence lets you do, what it will really cost to run, and how to put a CMS through its paces before you commit. Each one is written for the people who have to live with the result, editors and publishers as much as developers, and every factual claim links to its source.
In this section
10 pages- Section
Website CMS manuals: practical guides to running a publishing CMS
Practical administration guides for editors and publishers: how a CMS works, how to organise content, and how plugins and themes behave.
- Guide
CMS features checklist for news and article publishers
A practical checklist of the CMS features a news or article publisher should require, with why each matters and what to ask the vendor.
- Guide
CMS licences explained: GPL, MIT and commercial
What GPL, MIT, source-available and SaaS licences mean for a publisher who wants to own, modify or sell a site, with real CMS examples.
- Guide
How much does a CMS cost? A publisher's guide to running costs
The real cost of running a news or article CMS: licences, hosting, development, plugins, maintenance and migration, with vendor prices cited.
- Guide
How to evaluate a CMS: trial it before you commit
A practical method for evaluating a publishing CMS: demos, local installs, realistic test content, an editor task script and what to measure.
- Guide
News site design patterns: pages, accessibility and speed
Design patterns for news and article sites: home page, section fronts, article and author pages, with WCAG 2.2 and Core Web Vitals as the checks.
- Guide
How to evaluate a CMS editor: a task-based checklist
A task-based checklist for judging a CMS editing interface: drafting, embeds, images, preview, revisions and accessibility, using W3C's ATAG 2.0.
- Guide
Accepting contributor and reader submissions safely
How to set up roles, review queues and spam control for contributor and reader submissions, and how to label sponsored posts and user links.
- Guide
Web CMS reviews: how to read CMS comparisons critically
How to judge CMS reviews and comparison articles: affiliate disclosures, testing claims, sources and dates, using the US FTC's endorsement guidance.
- Guide
What CMS do news sites use? Sourced examples from publishers
Twelve publishers and the CMS each is documented as using, every one backed by a vendor case study, a vendor showcase page or the publisher itself.