We Reviewed Perch CMS And Love It

When designing a new site most need a CMS. We write a lot about WordPress because it’s the most popular. There are some other AWESOME CMS options out there. We’ve tried & supported many. Perch CMS being one of them, we really like.

Perch CMS - Content Management System

If you search the phrase “best CMS” you’ll receive over 2.4 million results. Stuff And Nonsense a well known agency uses Perch, we found that interesting.

Stuff And Nonsense doesn’t normally develop, but on occasion they’ll put their amazing designs on a CMS. Most of the times they choose Perch CMS the “really little CMS”. You can read why other people choose perch.

Perch CMS is built by & for developers

It’s delighting to see Perch CMS was built by developers for developers. In this case it means a laser focus to make Perch CMS small, fast and useful.

Rachel AndrewDrew McLellan are the developers behind Perch CMS. They operate the development shop edgeofmyseat.com.

It’s a paid CMS

This might drive some people away but wait. There are impressive benefits! Support and  a nice library of “addons” are a few. Community support is good sometimes. Perch however turbo charges a community style support system. The Perch team monitors and replies – other community members can share useful info too.

You don’t get that with any free CMS’s. Think of the time you’ll save!

And.. it’s pretty cheap approximately $80 USD.

Impressive Upgrade Path

One of the things that makes Perch CMS stand out. Beyond the simplicity is thought they put into scalability. If your small site grows and you need to scale you can upgrade to Perch Runway. This includes built in support for cloud storage, CDNs, Varnish, Dropbox and more.

The Runway edition costs a bit more. But with huge advantages NOT found in other CMS’s. And let me include, that coding additional features for your website to support these will cost you much more in time.

How Can I Start Using Perch?

We have Perch CMS flawlessly running on customers sites at Hostek. It works perfectly on our cPanel VPS hosting or shared cPanel hosting.

If you want to test Perch CMS for yourself, demo Perch here. Although that just gives you a preview of the CMS. It doesn’t even scratch the surface of how Perch CMS makes developing 10x easier.

Within a few minutes you can have a site with editable regions. And there’s flexibility within Perch CMS to change your editor. You can also use no editor at all for regions that don’t need formatting.

Perch Content Management System

A few MORE things that are awesome about perch CMS:

  • Built in forms plugin (it works so nice)
  • Easy to add Google analytics code and metadata
  • Editable regions can be a simple or full featured (WYSWYG)
  • Templatable navigation, pages and more..

See this short video on getting started with Perch by Rachel. Another resource for getting a feel for how complex problems can be solved with perch see their shortcodes. Or the Perch CMS documentation, which has great examples.

From what we’ve experienced Perch is impressive. It’s easy to start, supported (and updated). You can find quite a bit about using Perch from the site. But we plan on sharing more about using Perch in the future.

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