5 questions to ask before adding a new feature to your CMS

Are you planning to add a new feature to your CMS? Then I have a few questions you should totally ask yourself before you do that. So the people who create content usually have different needs from the people who manage the code that that content is published with. And that can lead to some natural tension between those groups. Because content creators are very deadline driven. They usually need things very quickly. They have to respond to trends, ASAP. Uh whereas the developers who usually manage a CMS, it's very mature technology. Uh they don't usually need to jump on a quick trend or anything like that, like content creators do. So they tend to think more long term about like How is this going to be more sustainable for us over years instead of over days or weeks, like content creators tend to think?

And so that creates kind of this like natural friction between these two groups And so it's very important when you're considering adding a new feature to think not only of the short-term needs but and the long-term needs and kind of decide which of those is more important. for your particular situation. Okay, so the first question is a really obvious one. The question is, do you really need this feature? And this is a good question to ask yourself because oftentimes people don't think about what they already have. And When you're working in a CMS too that has a lot of different user groups and a lot of different page types and things like that, um, where users may be segmented.

Often the you the feature might already exist, you just might not have access to it. So it's definitely worth asking this question and asking around to see if there might be a way to already do this with what you have The second question you need to ask yourself is when is this feature absolutely needed by? And it's very important to nail down this timeline because that helps you determine whether you go with kind of a more short-term sort of thinking or a more long-term sort of thinking when it comes to making changes. So ask yourself, do I have a few days, a few weeks, a few months, and make your decisions based on that. The third question to ask is who is going to be performing the task that this feature will be used for? And what are their skills

So you might have some content creators that are very comfortable with coding and with technology, and there might be a very quick way to implement a feature versus having to take the time to build out everything fully. to make it accessible within the admin. And so like that's definitely something that you should consider as you're deciding how to add this new feature. Because if you have somebody who's very comfortable with code, then it might be ultimately quicker for them to just do things in code versus doing things in the admin. The fourth question to consider is who will be responsible for the task that that feature does if the original task owner isn't there? So, you know, people go on vacation, people

have accidents, um, people leave companies, they move on to new jobs. It's something that you definitely have to consider before you add a feature Because the person who replaces that original task owner might not have the same skill set. And so that's something to consider as well when you're deciding how am I going to build this feature? Alright, y'all, I'm gonna get commercial on you here just for a second because I have to mention that this whole channel and this video are brought to you by Wagtail CMS. Wagtail CMS is a content management system that supports everybody on a content team. No matter whether you're a content creator, a developer, or a designer, Wagtail is designed to help you do your very best work. It is a very balanced content management system.

It is very user-friendly for folks who are not into code while also making the people who do code very happy. So please come check it out at Wagtail. org. The final question to consider is how reversible is the feature we're adding? So if the feature you're adding is just some, you know, cosmetic changes to the website, those are pretty easy to reverse. You're not going to like muck up your code base for years and years and years. um just by you know making a font change. You know, maybe there's a front end developer out there who disagrees with me on that. Definitely, you know, throw a comment in uh if you want. But I argue that when it comes to content management systems, the most important thing to consider is any changes you're making to the database.

Because any changes you make to the database are going to impact how easy it is to move data from one database to another database or from one content management system to another content management system. And also any database considerations take a bit longer to test to make sure everything is working properly And so that is definitely something that you really need to examine when you're considering adding a new feature. Now it might be um you know and not all database changes are the same. Um, you know, if you're making in in Wagtail, if you're making a change uh within Streamfield, that might be different versus making a change in an orderable block. or

making a field change or something like that. So anything that touches the database, definitely slow your roll and think. about how you want to implement this feature. But if it's something like kind of quick and cosmetic or like a field change or something like that, then it might just be quicker to go ahead and do it and then undo it later within the code. So I'm sharing these questions with you because I honestly wish I had them last year when we were trying to decide how to add a banner to Wagtail org to advertise Wagtail Space And so what uh I did back then was I went and found this application that we used to put a banner to support the folks in Ukraine at the top of the website.

It was a nice little application that Dan Braggus wrote for us and it just put a very basic banner at the top of the website at all times. And I pretty much was like, hey, maybe we can repurpose this for our banner uses. And what I liked about it was that you could go ahead and edit things within the Wagtail admin so anybody could make changes or use the banner. Like, you know, if my boss, who's not the most comfortable with code uh you know wanted to go ahead and add an emergency banner to our website then this would be a great feature to have um but when we went Through like repurposing it and invested some time in that, we found that you know the design um of it was not the greatest user experience. And uh

ultimately like what was better and quicker was adding just kind of a small hard-coded banner in the HTML template. And one of our engineers was like, hey, that might not be a good idea because you will definitely need to be able to have access to the repository to ever add that banner ever again. But for us, we have a very small team. And most of us on the team have access to our website repository already. We can push code changes. So when you have a team where like the majority of people are comfortable with code and can uh you know access the code, then sometimes the best solution just might be to use the code. instead of going through um

making everything editable within the CMS. And I share that example just as an illustration that sometimes making a short, quick code change is the better choice over making something longer term and more sustainable in the CMS. Alright y'all, I hope you found those questions useful. And if you want more tips like this, please like and subscribe. We also do a newsletter. There is a link down in the video description. Definitely hit it up if you want some more general tips on great things to do with your CMS.