What are the most important features to include when building Content Management System?

I'm building a new social platform. I understand that is very important to include a Content Management System as part of the development. Can you describe specific features you would develop within CMS function for the purposes of running a social platform website. How will CMS prove to be efficient?

In general, you can either design your own, or use an out-of-the-box CMS such as Drupal. If you design your own, I would say you would need to either bring on a technical co-founder with database experience or spend a bunch of time with someone like that learning how to lay out the database architecture.

In general though, if you design your own, you will probably need (Edited):

• Model - interaction between relational database and user interface
• View - user interface
• Controller - relational database, and associated stored procedures to access it

If you want more detail, you may try posting this over at http://stackoverflow.com/ since it is a more technical question.

Building a social platform AND a CMS is huge. First find out if you can just use a read made social software and a ready cms. Check out DotnetNuke + Active Social. I mention these two because I know ASP.NET. I am sure PHP and other platforms have similar combinations. But building them from scratch is too much work.

Really more of a Stackoverflow conversation, but here is a good resource to review when building CMS systems.

From PHP 5 CMS Framework Development Required features

• user management
• access control
• security


• extensibility

Desirable features

• performance
• database abstraction
• menuing


• internationalization/localization