A guide to Perch
Need to get the key facts quickly? This is a one page guide to Perch and the company behind the product and also includes screenshots and logos to download.
Key Facts
Perch is a really little content management system for when you (or your clients) need to edit content without the hassle of setting up a big CMS. However there is much more to Perch than just basic editing. Here are some of our key facts.
Perch is self-hosted and will run on any hosting that has PHP5 and MySQL. Perch can be installed on Windows, OS X or Linux hosts and used locally on any operating system during development.
Perch costs £35 (+ VAT where applicable) per site. All official add-ons are free for license holders. The currently available add-ons include a blog, event calendar, FoxyCart shop and image gallery.
Perch has a developer API. The official add-ons all make use of the developer API and developers can also use the API to extend Perch and add their own custom functionality.
Perch does not dictate your design. You can design a site and then drop Perch in at the end of the process. You do not need to build your entire site using a framework to be able to use Perch – this makes it ideal for adding to existing sites. See a video showing how to add Perch to an existing page.
Perch does not dictate your mark-up. Perch is HTML5 ready. You create your own content templates for Perch. These can be as simple as a text area or more complex such as contact information marked up using the hCard microformat. These templates can use any mark-up that you like – you can even edit XML or other text files using Perch.
Perch speaks many languages. The entire Perch interface can be translated. We already have 16 different languages available for download. If your language isn’t already there, creating a new language pack involves editing a simple text file so you can create your own.
Perch is opinionated but lets you work your way. We believe that WYSIWYG editors are a flawed concept and think that using structured content templates enables editors to concentrate on the content and not how it looks. Perch ships with the MarkItUp editor on the default templates to give basic text formatting ability. However many users do want WYSIWYG and so the plugin architecture allows easy installation of your favorite editor – we even have prepackaged versions of some common ones.
Perch has amazing support. When you pay for a product you should expect that entitles you to support when you need it. Many of our users have never installed a CMS before, and we’re here to help them get started.
Reviews and feedback
Our Twitter favorites is a curated stream of lovely things our users have said about us.
The Customer Stories section of the blog contains interviews with users.
Who uses Perch?
Perch is used by design agencies, freelance web designers and also by developers with larger applications as the page content editor. Well known sites using Perch include Get Firebug and the Carsonified conference websites.
About the company
Perch is a product developed by edgeofmyseat.com, a web development company located in Maidenhead, England. Company Directors Drew McLellan and Rachel Andrew are both industry experts and when not building web applications and adding new features to Perch they can be found writing and speaking on a variety of web development topics.
History
Perch is 2 years old on 31st May 2011. The initial idea for Perch was to create something to use on our own projects at edgeofmyseat.com. We had created a CMS framework for very large sites using the concept of content templates but sometimes needed to enable content editing on very small projects. We wanted to create something really quick and easy to deploy for those small, low budget sites.
The CMS market is very crowded however we felt we had something different. At the time the only real competitors were hosted products, and we knew that many people wanted to have control over the hosting of their CMS and not need to worry about the stability of the host or handover their FTP details to a third party. We entered the market promoting the core aims of the product – lightweight, quick to install, simple to use and enabling and promoting best practices in terms of output code.
Perch was bootstrapped and has received no investment funding. The product was profitable within 24 hours of launch and is now a sizable and growing part of our business.
Resources for reviewers
If you need any other details or higher res versions of images please get in touch.
Need to know more?
Contact us at hello@grabaperch.com with any questions. You are welcome to try a demo by signing up here – demos expire after 24 hours but if you need longer we can extend the period of any active demo. Just email us with details.
