You create the website for them, they use the “CMS” to update or change a few things (so they’re not annoying you with trivial work) and if they require bigger changes, they come back to you.

It is not a true CMS (like Joomla for instance), but a way of dynamically managing static content on a pre-existing site … so, pretty pointless for many people, and not as “simple” as they describe it.

Pretty useless from my point of view, but probably good if you want to develop a site from scratch that can be dynamically updated later. It doesn’t really make light work of anything.(

There are far better options out there. Oh, and customer support is terrible – I certainly won’t recommend them to anyone.

pulsecms.com

Things I like: I love the fact that there is no WYSIWYG interface, so many clients make a hash of their site by using horrible typography or colour clashes.
Love the fact you host it on your own server and can easily be rebranded. Also very happy with the price.

How the heck can someone grumble at £35!? If you can’t implement this into your clients site and make a mark-up on the price, you’re in the wrong game.

If you sign up you’ll get a unique instance of Perch created set up with a few templates already selected and a few new regions that you can choose any template for. I hope this helps you to see how Perch works.

Perch demo

Perch sounds awesome to me precisely *because* it doesn’t rely on a WYSIWYG editor, or enable changes to the page structure of a site, and I can host it myself.

I’m a big fan of Concrete 5 and WordPress. I have created many sites with both and would recommend both. But, in some situations they are overkill.

Sometimes you have a small, otherwise static, site. The client only needs to keep one or two areas of content up to date. Implementing a full-blown CMS is not only overkill but also opens up the can-of-worms that many a designer/developer has experienced when they give the client more control than they want/need/are able to handle. Perch would seem to fill this CMS need, perfectly.

I would also, however, really love a demo so I can see if this is true or not!

concrete5.org

As for adding a WTFISWACK interface… one of the strong points is that your client can’t ruin a great looking website by placing comic sans rainbow text next to the linked image on their desktop, one of the reasons I used a similarly simple CMS called WebYep. really most website owners just want to update text. Contribute did exactly the same thing and was $100 a pop… but that was Macromedia so it was cool.

To we wrap up, it’s got it’s place on the market… a with a few minor additions will find a strong niche in my opinion.

I suppose the best example of “hack” job would be WordPress, which is pretty light-weight compared to some of the other bulky CMS alternatives like Joomla. But is it really a “hack” job if you just take advantage of WP “pages” instead of using “posts”? Not to mention the ease of integrating a blog (which many clients prefer to have).

I use WordPress for just about all my projects, even if the client doesn’t specifically ask for a CMS. It’s extremely easy to build a theme around, there’s thousands of web 2.0 add-ons, and there is A LOT of support.

I’m not fully against using an alternative, but I’d really need some convincing not to use WordPress which is free.

@rachelandrew – Have you considered making Perch open source? It could prove to be more lucrative and help gain popularity.

WYSIWYG – we’ve had a few suggestions. What is likely is that we’ll add some kind of mark-up editor into the regions that use Textile/Markdown etc. To make it easy for people to do bold, links and so on. I think that will come in a dot release (free of charge and with a simple upgrade for existing customers of course)

We’ve been very keen not to create a reliance on JavaScript in the admin side – any kind of editor will require JavaScript which is fine but at a base level we want to make sure that the whole thing works well even if the editor doesn’t have JavaScript for some reason. So a mark-up editor would be an option not a requirement.

Images – at the moment we don’t do resizing but this is definitely scheduled for a dot release pretty soon. It is something we want to do. One of the issues with this is to resize images requires GD or ImageMagick installed on the server, most shared hosts have one or the other though so it shouldn’t be an issue but it’s a decent chunk of work to make sure we can get this working really well on almost every server.

New pages – we don’t have page creation. Perch isn’t that kind of tool. A lot of the complexity in a big CMS comes from managing new pages, navigation structures and so on. Perch is for those times you want to build a simple site but let the client edit some of the content. There are things like ExpressionEngine as Simon mentioned that are better suited to bigger content managing needs.

We put up a bit more info about some of the more interesting Perch features such as Multiple item content regions and sharing content regions that may be of interest.