Personal Blog

05.10.2010

Using Perch CMS and the Blog app

I have been a fan of Perch for quite some time now. In my opinion it’s the perfect Content Management System (CMS) for small websites that don’t need a lot of updating. With Perch it feels like I’m actually creating a website, and not filling data into a CMS and hacking together a template. Even after a website has been created and is up and running, it’s very simple to add Perch to it. There’s no “learning process” involved, which allows me to focus on creating websites instead of learning a CMS. ;)

After installation, all you have to do is add references in your PHP files where you want content to appear. For example:

<?php perch_content('About Us'); ?>

Now if you want to update the ‘About Us’ text, you can easily do that in Perch’s web interface. No more explaining to clients what to edit and what not to edit on a HTML page. ;)

Another awesome feature of Perch are the recently introduced add-ons. I have actually built this blog using the Blog add-on. In just a couple of hours, I was able to implement a fully-fledged blog into my existing website without any major changes.

The downside is that Perch isn’t free. It costs £35 per installation. On the other hand, the developers seem to be constantly updating the system. There’s also an active community around it and support questions are usually answered within 24 hours!