CMS Software Business Requirements

A business requirements and RFP checklist for evaluating Content Management System (CMS) platforms — covering functional requirements across authoring, publishing, and content delivery, plus non-functional evaluation criteria, delivered as an Excel evaluation matrix.

Why Off-the-Shelf Lists Fall Short

A generic list says "must support WYSIWYG editing, SEO, and multi-language content" and moves on. It won't flag the content-model lock-in trap: traditional CMS platforms often entangle content structure with presentation templates, so migrating later means re-modeling every content type from scratch instead of just re-skinning it. It won't ask whether preview and staging environments support multi-step approval chains across content owners, or whether the delivery API's caching and rate limits will actually hold up under real traffic. And it rarely mentions the migration gotcha where embedded widgets, shortcodes, and rich-text formatting break silently when content moves between platforms.

What's Inside

• Functional Requirements — organized by content authoring and workflow, publishing and preview, content modeling and taxonomy, multi-site management, and localization
• 100+ Non-Functional Requirements — performance, security, scalability, integration, and compliance criteria
• Evaluation Template — Excel-based vendor scoring matrix with weighting

How Teams Use This

• Digital teams compare headless and traditional CMS platforms on identical criteria instead of chasing vendor-specific demo scripts
• IT and marketing stakeholders jointly score requirements so content-model flexibility and governance aren't traded away for editor convenience
• Teams planning a replatform use it to pressure-test vendors on migration and content-model portability before committing

Built For

Digital experience and marketing technology leaders, IT architects, business analysts, and procurement teams selecting or replacing a CMS.