Content Management Systems (CMS) for mission critical Web properties are a big issue. Choose the right one and, all other things being equal, your Web site will be organized and manageable. Choose the wrong one and you’ll be the proud owner of a house of cards that is going to suck away your time, money, and market credibility. It is for these reasons that organizations got to great lengths to evaluate and select CMSs.
Of course, the scenarios I just outlined are, as you might have concluded, more relevant for large projects where coordination of a number of administrators, editors, and contributors is crucial. But what if your problem is on a smaller scale? What if it’s a subset of a large Web site or something for a small team or a workgroup?
While you might be tempted to extend your large scale CMS so that it encompasses these smaller projects sometimes that’s overkill … training less skilled users to drive an enterprise-sized solution to make simple modifications has its own overheads that may well make that a far less desirable solution.
Where I’m heading with this is to suggest that small, lightweight CMSs may be worth evaluating for smaller projects and this week I want to highlight one that I really like the design and usability of: Perch published by the wonderfully named edgeofmyseat.com.
Now about 2 years old, Perch is stable, minimal, and extremely cost effective … I was going to write “cheap” but that never sounds good and Perch is, in fact, extremely good.
Perch requires PHP5 and MySQL and to make sure that you can, in fact, install it, the company provides a test application that you upload to your server and execute after creating a database for the test to use.
Although it isn’t difficult, installation of Perch is a bit more complicated than many PHP applications but this is the only hard aspect of Perch.
Once installed, all you have to do to enable page editing in Perch is to add a line of code that loads the Perch CMS code. On each of those pages, editable regions are defined by tags such as … in this case, the text ‘intro’ is the name of the editable region. When Perch-enabled pages are loaded into a browser, the content named in the tag is read from the Perch database and substituted, on the fly, for the tag itself.
In the Perch management application you can set the template each region uses. These templates include, among others, articles, code blocks, a contact form, a download feature, event details, maps, and slideshows. A region can contain multiple copies of the template it is assigned supporting, for example, multiple news items ordered by date.
Perch allows for a local development copy as well as a remote production copy and can be branded. There’s also support for microformats, regions that are shared across pages, previewing edits, saving a change as a draft, resizing and thumb-nailing images, and integrated dynamic maps.
Perch supports two types of user: Administrators, who can make any and all changes to the configuration and content, and editors, who can only modify content. It would be great to see the ability to control which editors can modify which content and such a thing could probably be achieved using Perch’s API.
There’s a lot to Perch that makes it very effective and versatile. It sits somewhere just below the fully-blown CMS systems while remaining a low overhead, lightweight content maintenance solution. At £35 (about $55US), Perch is good value and very impressive.
If you’ve tried Perch or worked with other lightweight CMSs, let me know what you think and what you’d recommend.
