Perch CMS
30 November 2010
When we set out to re-design and re-develop industryinteractive.net, we really wanted to simplify things. The last web site was built on Wordpress, which isn’t an overly complex system, but between the core and all of the plugins you end up installing, there are quite frequent updates which are a bit of a hassle to perform. We’re definitely not knocking Wordpress; it’s great software, and we’ll be using it more in the future, but for industryinteractive.net, it was just overkill.
The thing that’s so great about Perch is that you can just build your pages as you normally would, and then insert some “Content regions” in them. So I’d code my page normally using HTML5, XHTML, or whatever, and then drop in a tag that looks like this:
<?php perch_content('My content'); ?>
Then you reload the page, and define the properties of that region in the web admin. You can select from a number of pre-defined templates, or, as in the case of the portfolio section on this site, define your own, custom template.
Perch CMS isn’t free, it’ll run you about $50 per web site.