The benefits and limitations of page-based content

Perch is a page based CMS. Not only is our architecture based upon physical pages or files on disk, but the editing experience cleanly maps content to pages. Much of the simplicity of our admin experience is down to this decision. Our own experience developing sites for clients taught us that editors understand a site as a tree of pages, the simplest way for them to navigate their content was to have it ordered just as on the site they viewed.

In most Perch installs when an editor wants to change text on a particular page they navigate to that page in the admin and edit the text. There is no need to train editors in terms of where to edit content so it shows up on a certain page – the admin matches the website. Too many content management systems expect content editors to understand the underlying data structure of how content is stored and used. Perch is not like that.

Where content is shared we display it separately as a Shared Region. This ensures that content editors understand that changing this piece of content doesn’t just change it on this page, but potentially on many other pages.

In Perch you can easily reuse any of your page-based content using perch_content_custom. This flexibility allows you to filter and sort content – creating product listings, filtered portfolios and even real estate listings, while still keeping it simple to edit. For many, many sites tying content to pages works really well for editors.

The limitations of page-based content

As sites become more complex the page-based model, which works exceptionally well for those simple sites, can however raise issues. More complex sites may well have large sets of data that aren’t pages at all. For example you might have sets of products, courses, properties and documents that are never really displayed as a “page”. Sometimes you will want to display these collections as a page, but you may also be using that data in a variety of different ways around the site.

One thing we see is people creating pages that are simply a document store, a way to give content editors somewhere to add a whole bunch of content that will then be reused elsewhere using perch_content_custom. Having to tell editors to go to a fake page to edit content that then shows up somewhere else is potentially as confusing as asking the editor of a simple site to create a blog post that then becomes a page!

We also see people renaming the Blog App to try and create a store of content that then has a menu item within the App menu. This then means that they lose a lot of the functionality built into Perch Content and are using a Blog as something that isn’t a Blog.

Perch Runway – providing content management outside of the page-based paradigm

The need for a more flexible method of storing and reusing content is one of the core features of Perch Runway. Where appropriate in a Runway site you will still have Page content – even complex web applications need that about us, or contact page. Although Runway moves away from physical files on disk, as far as your content editors are concerned the about page is a “page” whether it really represents a physical page or not.

The Collections feature however has been designed to solve the issues that we see people trying to solve within Perch currently, in an elegant way. You can create a Collection to represent any kind of content – using the same structured content templates that you are familiar with in Perch. However a Collection doesn’t need to be tied to a page and the content will then be available for reuse around the site as appropriate.

You will be able to make a Collection a main menu item – much like an App can be in Perch now. However if it makes sense for a Collection to be found on a particular page – as in a content editor would expect it to show up there – you’ll be able to attach it. For example you might have a Collection of News articles and the main place they display is on a news listing “page”. You can choose to have News as a main menu item or simply attach it to the news page, if that seems more logical for your editors.

The best of both worlds

Perch Runway is Perch, which means that if you start out with a simple site that makes sense using page-based content on Perch and it suddenly grows in requirements after launch, you’ll be able to upgrade to Runway. We won’t penalize you for making the simpler choice – in fact we’d suggest that you do. Providing a simple and pleasant experience to content editors, a tailored experience that matches their understanding of their site, is very much at the heart of Perch … and Perch Runway.