Time for action-choosing additional features
- Make a new heading on our Brainstorming Sheet. Call it Other Features Needed.
- Review the following list and write down all the features you want to have on your site below the heading.
- Blog: Date-wise diary-like entries on topics of your liking
- Chat: Live chat between users, or between you and the users
- Classifieds Advertisements: To buy or sell things, list jobs, and so on
- Discussion Forum: Here users can discuss their ideas, opinions, and ask for help
- Document Management: Upload, download, annotate, and manage different documents
- Events Management: List, browse, and find out events
- File Repository: To create a downloads area or something similar
- Help Desk or Bug Reporting: Make it easier for users to ask for help
- Invoicing or Billing System: Manage orders or subscriptions
- Knowledge Base or FAQ: Articles explaining features of your site or product, and a Frequently Asked Questions list
- Mail Form: Allow users to send you an email using a contact form
- My Home or Dashboard: Custom page after logging in for users, should customizations or personalization be allowed?
- Newsletter: Updates via email
- Outgoing Link Management: Track what links people are clicking
- Photo Gallery: Upload photos, manage albums, ratings, and comments
- Plug-in Support: Extend functionality by adding plug-ins
- Polls / Surveys / Quizzes: Analyze your users' opinions
- Rating System: Rate each article
- Site Search Engine: Internal search engine for your site
- Social Networking: Friends, network, scraps, and so on
- User Contributions: Allow users to contribute content
- Video: User-contributed or admin-published
- Web Services: Provide others easy access to your site features
- Widgets: Embed content from your CMS on others' sites
- Wiki: Allow free and easy content updates via a wiki
3. Go through your Intended Outcomes list. If you feel you need to add any other modules or features, go ahead and do that.
4. For our Yoga site, we need some of these features. Here's how your list may look once you complete it.
What just happened
We evaluated what add-on features our site needs apart from basic content management components. We reviewed a list of popular additional features and picked the ones that we need on our Yoga site.
Reviewing a checklist simplifies the selection process. When you look at an item in a checklist, you can evaluate how useful it will be, and then choose it if it's worth it. Making this feature list also strengthens our understanding of site requirements. We can then identify whether a plug-in to the CMS of our choice will fulfil our needs.
We are now at a very good stage. We have a very good understanding of what we want for our Yoga site. We have not only listed our functional requirements, but also a lot of technical needs. Let's review what we covered in this chapter.