Perch has grown up a lot since being introduced to the world as a “really little content management system” for small sites. Now, it has got a big brother, Perch Runway!
How to pick between two of them and what are the real differences affecting your business?
Let’s find out!
Budget Matters
First of all there is an obvious price difference that will contribute to overall development cost. Perch in it’s standard version is about four times cheaper.
Managing Website
If you are an editor – In my opinion, it doesn’t matter too much which version you are using. Perch offers similar capabilities regardless. You can perform majority of day to day tasks such as images upload, text formatting, checking your form entries etc. in the way you’ve always been doing – no changes here. Official add-ons are also supported for both versions.
Because of Perch Runway’s dynamic nature, it’s a little easier to manage website’s structure such as adding pages and moving them around.
On the contrary to Perch CMS, Runway does not create physical pages but makes them on the fly when needed. A content driven approach… Due to that fact it’s a little more convenient to move or re-name pages as well.
Consider these:
- Does your website consists of multiple nested levels of navigation?
- Do you have a special data types that you’d like to define and display around your website in more than one place such as call to actions, testimonials, people’s profiles?
- Do you anticipate to grow your website significantly from handful of pages to tens or hundreds?
- Do you need a shop facility to sell goods online?
Building Website
If you can write HTML, you can create Perch templates. Create your own or use a framework like Bootstrap. Perch doesn’t care! Perch templates define your content and create the admin UI in one go, making structured content a breeze. Building websites is very similar in both versions of Perch. Regardless of the version you still get clearly labeled and organized content “chunks” that are simple to manage, and allow you to keep a tight rein on your design.
No more WYSIWYG tag soup!
How is Perch Runway different?
Perch really shines on small to medium projects. Being based on a file system, it’s not ideal for very large projects.
That’s why Perch Runway takes up where Perch leaves off. While Perch assumes that all content is tied to a page, Perch Runway content Collections are assumed to appear around your site in different ways.
Think products, real estate listings, job boards. These collections can be managed wherever makes sense to editors: attached to a given page or pages, or via the site menu. Items in a given collection can be easily related to items in other Collections, for example linking Articles and Authors.
What stays the same for both versions
Perch and Perch Runway have the same template engine, they both have structured content at their heart. Both solutions leave the mark-up (code) and site design up to you.
When it comes to editing, everything feels very familiar in terms of adding, removing and updating media.
Perch Runway powers Perch Shop
Perch Shop is a relatively new player when it comes to online shop or e-commerce platforms. Although still young and lacking some more elaborate features in comparison to Magento or Woocommerce; it shows a real potential in producing a tailored shopping experience.
If you are considering to sell a number of products via your website, enable shopping cart and payment gateway than Perch Shop is a tool for the job.
The only requirement is Perch Runway.
Find out more about Perch Shop and it’s features
