Features

How Perch helps you create beautiful websites

Perch is designed to make building and editing small sites a breeze. However small doesn’t mean lacking in functionality. Take a look at the things you can take advantage of when you use Perch.

If you still have questions, drop us a line at hello@grabaperch.com.

When building your site

Custom Fields everywhere

Perch templates become the content forms editors complete in the Control Panel. Add fields to represent any content, and be sure that your editors always know what to enter. Everything is a custom field and in your control.

Use Bootstrap, Foundation or any front-end framework

Perch makes it easy for you to integrate a CMS with a site built using Bootstrap, Foundation or other front-end frameworks, JavaScript plugins and methods.

Retrofit an existing site

Perch is a brilliant choice if you need to retrofit an existing site with a CMS, or just make some small parts of the site editable. No need to turn the whole site into a “theme”.

Edit HTML, xml, JSON or any text format

You can create Perch templates to edit any type of text content, or to re-present content entered as HTML in the CMS in another form. For example, turning your product catalogue into JSON format for import elsewhere.

Create site navigation and breadcrumbs

Perch offers flexible ways to create site navigation, using the same template language used everywhere in Perch.

Share content across pages

Make it easy to keep a site up to date by ensuring that content repeated around the site only needs editing in one place.

For your client

Give as much editing ability as makes sense

Some clients want full editing capability and to be able to make big changes. For others they want simple, task-focused capability. Perch gives you control over what to hand over, and you can change that at any time.

Make SEO simple

Perch can help you ensure that your SEO is up to scratch. Giving clients ways to edit page titles and descriptions through the CMS.

Add inline help to control panel forms

Perch gives you several ways to add help to the Control Panel. This helps your client remember how to use the CMS - saving calls to you!

Undo, drafts and Preview

Give your content editors confidence to create new content. They can create changes as a draft and preview how they look. Undo allows them to back out of a change if needed.

Roles and Permissions

Define Roles with Permissions and then give access to groups of people to work on different content in the CMS.

Upload, resize and crop images

Whether adding content through a WYSIWYG editor or using a Perch template tag, you get to choose the dimensions an image upload should be and if it should be just resized or cropped.

Edit with Markdown, Textile or HTML

If you want to do some formatting within a textarea Perch offers you a choice of Markdown, Textile or HTML - with or without an editor plugin.

Build page templates for new pages

Offer content editors the ability to create new pages from predefined “Master Pages”.

Localized admin

The Perch Control Panel can be localized, translated into the language your client uses. We even have translations available for download.

Choice of Rich Text Editors

In Perch you aren’t tied to one Rich Text or WYSIWYG Editor. You have several options available for download - Redactor, CKEditor and TinyMCE - or you can choose to use Markdown or Textile with MarkItUp.

A Control Panel your clients will love

At Perch we believe that content editors are often the “forgotten users” of a website. Not so with Perch. Our Control Panel makes editing content easy, Perchers frequently report that training time is more than halved when they hand a site over when compared to solutions like WordPress.

Assets Management

The Assets Panel in Perch helps you and your content editors add, select and reuse images, files and video easily.

For your design business

White labelled Control Panel

You can remove Perch branding from the Control Panel, rename the perch folder and even add your own UI customizations.

Easy upgrade from Perch to Runway

Advise a small solution to start, knowing that if your client’s needs change they have somewhere to go. Upgrading a Perch site to Perch Runway is straightforward.

A CMS created for design professionals

Our aim with Perch is to create the very best solution for professional web designers, developers and agencies. We won’t get distracted chasing the “do it yourself” market, ensuring that the work we put in is for our core audience and the people who really love Perch.

A CMS created for people build design businesses

With over 8 years of Perch behind us, you can be sure of the stability of the solution you base your business on and our commitment to it. We succeed by helping the 1000s of companies who have built their offering on Perch succeed.