This post is written for the people actually inside the work: the marketing platform engineers and technical content strategists who spend real time modeling content, shipping workflows, and trying to create a CMS that doesn’t fight its own authors. What follows isn’t a high level executive checklist. It’s a practitioner’s view of the table-stakes capabilities a CMS needs if it’s going to function at the centre of an enterprise marketing platform and the extension points it absolutely has to make possible.
If you’ve ever evaluated CMSes for marketing teams, or had to live with ones chosen for you, you start to see the same split over and over. There are the things that absolutely have to come out of the box, and then there are the things a CMS doesn’t need to ship natively, as long as it is extensible enough that you can build them without heroic effort. You can customize plenty, but you shouldn’t have to rebuild the foundation just to get work done.
That split leads naturally to two buckets: the capabilities that must exist out of the box, and the ones the CMS doesn’t need to ship natively but absolutely needs to make possible through clean extension points. Both matter, but for different reasons: one is baseline viability, the other determines whether the CMS can grow with you instead of boxing you in.
And sometimes having something out of the box can work against you. You get boxed into their version of a feature instead of building the one you actually need. But there are a few places where out of the box support is not just helpful, it is mandatory. Anything less and you are paying down CMS debt forever: through migrations, brittle plugins, duplicated models, or constant workaround engineering.
The mandatory bucket
So let me start with the first bucket, the mandatory one. These are the missing capabilities you feel instantly, the seams you end up patching with scripts, plugins, governance rules, or expensive workarounds.
Different systems solve these in different ways, but if too many of them are missing out of the box1, you end up relying on workarounds more than you should. At some point, the CMS stops feeling like the centre of the platform and starts feeling like another constraint.
Multiple component or field types for authoring content
A CMS needs to support more than a single monolithic content shape. Marketing content comes in many forms, so the system has to offer a variety of fields and components so marketers can structure content properly without developer intervention.
The ability to extend existing component and field types for authoring content
A CMS should let you extend or customize components without forking the system or building brittle hacks, and without having to register entirely new field types just for small tweaks.
Conditional component or field settings
Marketers should be able to configure components based on context. If the CMS supports conditional logic, you can simplify the authoring experience and enforce guardrails without forcing everything into templates.
Rich text editing
There is no world where marketing can function without reliable, flexible rich text editing. The editor needs to be stable, predictable, and capable of handling formatting, embeds, and basic structure.
A way to preview your work before publishing
Marketers need to see their content in context, not guess how it will render. A preview workflow is essential for quality, especially when content appears in multiple layouts or templates.
A way for other authenticated users to preview work before publishing
Collaboration does not work if only the author can see drafts. Stakeholders need authenticated previews so they can review work without screenshots or copy-pasted text.
Drafts that actually behave like drafts
Drafts need to save safely, persist over time, and avoid leaking into the live site. If drafts are unreliable, marketers stop trusting the CMS and start working in Google Docs instead.
Content scheduling
Scheduling is basic operational hygiene. Marketing plans revolve around timing, and a CMS that cannot schedule content reliably creates unnecessary production pressure.
Multiple taxonomies
Content needs to be classified from multiple angles. Tags, categories, segments, journeys, and whatever else the team relies on should be possible without workarounds.
A sane way to delete content
Deletion should not be destructive or terrifying. Ideally there is an archive or soft-delete flow that prevents accidental loss but still gives teams control over what stays and what goes.
Ways to separate content types cleanly
Pages are not blog posts, and neither are announcements or landing pages. A CMS needs to logically separate content types so models stay clear and marketers are not overloaded with irrelevant fields.
Navigation management
Navigation is content. Teams need a straightforward way to manage menus, labels, and links without opening engineering tickets for every change.
Some kind of asset management
Images, videos, SVGs, PDFs, etc are all relevant when you’re creating marketing content, and a CMS that cannot handle assets in some way out of the box (without addons) creates unnecessary friction.
Role based permissions
Different people need different levels of access. Clear, native role-based permissions keep content governance sane and reduce accidental edits.
A way to reuse content
When teams build content modules, promos, or key components, they should be usable across the site without duplication. Reusability reduces drift and keeps messaging consistent.
A way to create templates / content blueprints
Not every page should start from scratch. Templates or blueprints give marketers the structure they need while still allowing flexibility.
A way to version control your fields, components, and content types
Content modeling evolves over time. Having version control keeps changes intentional and safe, and it makes collaboration between developers far easier.
Ability to comment on content inside the CMS
Inline comments let marketers and reviewers collaborate directly where the content lives instead of juggling external docs or Slack threads.
A way to duplicate content
Sometimes you do not want to start from zero. Duplication allows teams to reuse structure or layout quickly. It is astonishing how many CMSes still treat this as an extra.
Basic content history
Teams need visibility into who changed what and when for individual items. A basic history or audit trail builds trust, helps debugging, and supports compliance.
An ability to integrate with external services and vendors
Modern marketing stacks depend on many tools. And together they form a bespoke platform for the marketing team. A CMS should make it straightforward to integrate analytics, translation, experimentation, or personalization systems without breaking its core.
Multi-tenant capable
As marketing platforms grow, they often need multiple sites, regions, brands, or properties that share infrastructure but differ in content, configuration, or governance. A CMS should be able to support this without hacks, duplicated environments, or brittle workarounds. Multi-tenant capability keeps things scalable, maintainable, and aligned across teams while still allowing the separation you need.
A predictable way to manage URLs and redirects
A CMS should let teams define and adjust URLs safely without breaking the site or requiring engineering intervention. Redirects, slug changes, and URL patterns should be manageable and transparent. When URL behavior is unpredictable, everything from SEO to content migration becomes painful.
A way to perform bulk operations safely
A CMS should allow teams to update, archive, delete, or modify high-level attributes across multiple items without resorting to one-by-one edits or manual queries. Bulk operations matter for migrations, taxonomy changes, rebrands, housekeeping, and large-scale content updates. When the CMS cannot handle these safely and natively, the burden shifts to engineers and slows down the entire marketing workflow.
A way to define structural relationships between content
A CMS should support simple structural relationships so content can be organized and connected in ways that reflect how people actually navigate information. This includes the ability to create parent and child hierarchies, reference other content items directly, and maintain these connections predictably over time. Marketing content often depends on these structural links for sequencing, context, and discoverability, and without them the underlying platform becomes inconsistent and difficult to scale.
Publishing automation hooks
A CMS should provide reliable events or triggers for core actions such as creating, updating, publishing, unpublishing, and deleting content. These hooks are essential for keeping the rest of the marketing platform in sync, whether that means updating a search index, regenerating pages, clearing caches, triggering notifications, or syncing with external tools. Without predictable publishing events, teams end up building brittle polling systems or manual workarounds that slow down every workflow.
The extensible bucket
These are the things you don’t need out of the box, but you absolutely need clean extension points for. If you’ve ever had to hack a CMS to do something it never intended, you know why this category exists.
Once the essentials are covered, the next category is the set of things that do not need to come bundled, but the CMS still needs to make straightforward to build. This is where flexibility matters. If the architecture is sound and the extension points are clear, you can shape the system to fit your team’s needs without fighting it or piling on technical debt. These are not table stakes, but they become critical as your marketing platform grows and your workflows mature.
SSO integration
The CMS does not need to ship SSO by default, but it should not fight it. Authentication needs to fit into the larger company ecosystem cleanly and without custom rewrites.
A way to un-publish content on a schedule
Unpublishing at a specific time is common in campaigns, promos, and regulatory updates. If the CMS doesn’t ship it, it should at least provide hooks to build it without contortions.
A way to create a changeset and schedule it to go live
Coordinated releases often involve multiple pieces of content. The CMS should make it possible to group changes and publish them together on a defined schedule.
A way to archive content
Archiving lets teams hide content without deleting history. Even if it is not built in, the CMS should make it easy to create this state and manage it consistently.
A way to create approval based workflows
Most marketing teams eventually want review steps. If the CMS doesn’t include this natively, its API and model should make it feasible to build a clean, reliable approval flow.
A platform wide audit trail
If the CMS’s native history is limited, it should still expose enough structure to layer on deeper, cross project auditing. This becomes especially important in regulated industries or when content spans multiple properties.
A way to move from staging → QA → production for complicated work that involves more than just content changes
Sometimes content updates come bundled with schema, template, or configuration changes. The CMS should support multiphase promotion paths or at least give you the tools to build them.
A way to localize content on a granular level
Not every CMS ships sophisticated localization. What matters is that you can build locale-specific variations, syncing logic, or translation workflows without rewriting the platform.
A way to register custom validation rules
As content models grow more complex, teams need the ability to define their own validation rules to protect quality and prevent broken layouts. A CMS should make it possible to enforce requirements such as mandatory fields, mutually exclusive options, allowed combinations, or component level constraints without resorting to manual checking. Even if this is not built in, the CMS should expose clear extension points so teams can add consistent, reliable validation that supports the way their authors actually work.
A few ending thoughts
One more point that matters but doesn’t neatly fit into either bucket:
A CMS has to meet marketers where they are.
Different organizations have different levels of technical comfort, content complexity, and operational maturity, and the CMS needs to match that reality instead of forcing teams into workflows they’re not ready for. A system can be powerful on paper and still be the wrong fit if the day-to-day authoring experience doesn’t feel approachable to the people actually using it.
And it is worth stating plainly: our stakeholders are the marketing team. Their comfort, not ours, is the benchmark. A CMS that feels elegant to engineers but confusing to marketers has already missed the point. It also cannot be designed only for the most technical people on the team. A healthy authoring experience should support the full range of contributors, from power users to occasional authors. The whole purpose of the technical foundation is to make their work easier, faster, and more reliable, not to optimize for the preferences of the people building it.
If you’re a marketing platform engineer, architect, or anyone responsible for the long-term health of a marketing CMS, these buckets are a starting point, not a standard. Use them to start conversations, challenge assumptions, and refine how you evaluate the systems you depend on. Teams evolve. Workflows mature. Your CMS has to keep up with both.
The reason this list is long is because the pain shows up in the details. When you’re actually inside the work, building models, shipping content, integrating workflows, these are the places where CMSes either support you or work against you.
- This caveat is important, because I’ve yet to discover a CMS that includes everything in my mandatory list. ↩︎
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