I recently used Perch for my new portfolio site. What I like about it is it puts your markup first, then the CMS plugs into the areas where you need it. It allowed me to create a site where I can keep the markup lean, resulting in speed improvement I wouldn’t have seen with other CMS options. I've used both Wordpress and Concrete5 before while these are great if you need to allow your clients complete control, I find the can be bloated as a consequence.

 

I'd love to discuss Perch more with anyone else who uses it here.

 

http://grabaperch.com/

I only used it in it's early days and it's come a long way since then.

On a side note, nice site!

On a side note, nice site!

 

Second that, great portfolio site, good work and I love your blog in particular!

I've wrestled with Perch quite extensively recently to convert a static site to partly CMS powered and enjoyed using it. I loved how straightforward it was and how the conversion process involved virtually no significant modifications to the original mark-up. It's a clever little system, but I'm not convinced that the brilliant simplicity justifiably translates to £50 per website. Perhaps a license allowing up to three, maybe five, websites, but just one? I can only see them excelling among corporate sites, as opposed to common blog sites.

 

I'd love to use Perch over Wordpress since it bypasses the template palaver, but it would be a Christmas present at that price!

^ £50 is cheap for what it allows you to achieve. Compare it to the time you'd spend setting up, say, a Wordpress site that has the same content structure. With Perch you could easily integrate it into your templates in an hour or so, with Wordpress it's probably going to be a good day's worth? That makes Perch faster and cheaper to deploy doesn't it?

I used to use Perch as my CMS of choice. £50 is a good price for what it is, but I have to admit that I was put off using it for multiple projects for myself or acquaintances. For client work it's great and the price is easily recouped in your quote. It's much better than say Expression Engine (financially). I haven't used EE but I understand it's very good. With the level of smaller businesses I've worked with, the added £200+ doesn't appeal to them. A lot of clients ask for WP from my experience. I also used to use Concrete but withdrew from it due to the lack of the marketplace (I'm not a dev so sometimes might rely on the odd plugin or too).

 

I use different CMS's these days, but Perch is still in my tool belt and I recommend it for client work but perhaps the price tag for personal projects is a little off putting. I haven't used it much this year but I understand it's gone through an overhaul of sorts.

 

Nice site by the way

^ £50 is cheap for what it allows you to achieve. Compare it to the time you'd spend setting up, say, a Wordpress site that has the same content structure. With Perch you could easily integrate it into your templates in an hour or so, with Wordpress it's probably going to be a good day's worth? That makes Perch faster and cheaper to deploy doesn't it?

 

Sure it does. I still think £50 is excessive though, especially per site. We all have different financial approaches though.

I haven't used EE but I understand it's very good. With the level of smaller businesses I've worked with, the added £200+ doesn't appeal to them. A lot of clients ask for WP from my experience. I also used to use Concrete but withdrew from it due to the lack of the marketplace (I'm not a dev so sometimes might rely on the odd plugin or too).

 

It really depends on the project you're working on, certainly if you're working on low end sites, say sub £1000, then it can be hard to justify it. That said, EE is best suited to medium to large content sites anyway so the actual software cost becomes small % of the overall cost.

 

EE developers tend to include the cost of EE + addons in the project price, rather than show it as an additional cost to the client.

 

One of EE's big advantages is that you can do lots of stuff "out of the box" where other systems require a ton of addons or time consuming/expensive custom development. £200+ then becomes very cheap when you look at the overall development cost.

Sure it does. I still think £50 is excessive though, especially per site. We all have different financial approaches though.

 

Sure, finances are always a consideration.

 

Consider what you get for that £50

- a Perch licence

- free version updates

- unlimited technical support

- a bunch of free addons

 

...and for that £50 you've provided your client with a fully editable web site.

...and for that £50 you've provided your client with a fully editable web site.

 

Or provided myself even, since I decided to invest in a Perch licence yesterday for my own website. Up until then I would just publish content directly to the database via phpMyAdmin, thought it was time to make it slightly easier. Very happy with the purchase so far. It reaffirms my convictions against Wordpress.

 

I'm not too keen on their public support though, I've noticed they can be a bit... snappy, or blunt, sometimes people don't get replies at all. Still, it's good stuff.

I'm just starting a second site with Perch and one of the main reasons we've gone with it a second time is that the Ciient finds the editing interface quite easy to use.

Perch's strengths are ease of use and the ability to plug it into an existing website meaning we can create a site and then make various areas of it 'editable'. We've also found it easy to create special modules for cases where extra features are needed. And as a programmer the code base is simple and straightforward to understand and extend.

 

On the downside...

* it is a 'one man' operation, which means support is basically from Drew or not at all.

* The code is uncommented (and uses a mix of tabs and spaces, which annoys me).

* You need to think carefully about how you name Regions, Layouts and Files as it is hard to rename things once they've been entered into the database.

* There is no routing module.

* You'll get used to republishing templates and having to load a page before it exists (existing users know what I mean )

 

Overall it has worked well for us but I'm not sure it will replace Wordpress or Drupal in our set of tools, it definitely fills in gap though for a simple CMS.

 

HTH someone

haven't used perch but it looks promising

 

Sarah - you have a a typo on your frontpage: missing apostrophe from "Lets Work Together"

No, I don't, what's that cms builder good at?

I used to write my own CMS and hated having to work with bloated CMS like Wordpress. Now I am using Minorit (www.minorit.com) for simple websites.