Perch – a lightweight but powerful CMS for small sites

At edgeofmyseat.com we have been developing content management systems since the company began in 2001. We have developed completely custom systems, implemented third party and open source systems, moved data from one system to the other, and developed our own CMS framework that we now use for most of the websites we develop that require a content management system or where content management is part of the spec.

While our full scale CMS framework is fantastic (if I do say so myself!) it’s a big solution for when a site needs real content management functionality – usually along with a whole host of other features. We also often get requests for something on a much smaller scale – the situation where a client doesn’t want to manage large amounts of content, they just want to be able to edit the text on a few pages, so that they aren’t tied into having to come back to a web developer every time a bit of copy needs changing.

We began thinking about this requirement for a simple CMS late last year. How could we provide a simple content management solution that didn’t require compromises to be made in the quality of the site, and ease of production? We wanted something that was simple to install and that allowed designers to create their site as normal and not be forced into battling with fiddly template tags just to edit a basic text area. However we still wanted to maintain the concept of structured data – enabling the use of microformats – as this is a core concept in our full scale CMS.

Perch is the result of our development to meet this requirement for simple yet structured content management. We’re launching at the end of May, however there is a video on the website that shows just how simple editing content on a website can be. If you are interested in the potential of the product check out this example screenshot on Flickr showing a custom news item edit page. Perch – as with our full scale CMS – contains many years of CMS development experience by Drew and myself, distilled down to something that can be up and running in minutes. We’re really very proud of it and are very excited about seeing it ‘out there’ helping people to give content editing functionality to their clients.