Customer Stories: Ryan Singer of 37signals

This series of posts profiles some of the people using Perch. If you use Perch and would like to be featured here drop us a line at: hello@grabaperch.com.

Ryan Singer of 37signals

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I’ve been using Perch since January 2010, previously I have used MoveableType and later TextPattern. Since then I’ve run a few sites on WordPress and been happy about the functionality but really frustrated by the templating experience.

I love that Perch is apparently trying to stay out of my templates. I feel like my templates are still fully under my control, and I can sprinkle a little Perch in here and there to get the client-editable magic that I need. That’s extremely important to me and none of the other CMSes seem to do a good job of it. Perch doesn’t change the way I create sites. I make my sites just as if they are static and then sprinkle some Perch tags in. I rarely have to rethink my design or work around Perch’s constraints. That’s great.

Clients have never been confused about editing with Perch. It’s been very easy to explain.

- Ryan Singer

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Diamond Way Buddhist Center: Chicago

I’ve been running a site for the Diamond Way Buddhist Center of Chicago and updating it by hand for years. It always takes time to update the events and make changes, and I couldn’t really farm out the task to other people. I avoided converting the site to a CMS because most options, like Wordpress, are totally invasive and would require me to rethink all my templates. With Perch, i was able to make the whole site editable without rethinking the templates at all. What an awesome thing. It took basically two days of work to make the events section and home page content fully editable by a non-technical person. What else could you want from a CMS?

Perch features used: I used mainly ‘text’ and ‘text block’ content regions for the home page and the Events plugin (with heavily customized output).