Hello everyone,
So this is a CMS framework i’ve come across in the past, yet with a now impending potential project in sight I feel it could really benefit from it. They currently use a site-builder & host service for their website, which is mostly visual drag and drop, however I’m generally against such services. I’m still not 100% sure how Perch liscencing operates but I wanted to ask if anyone else here has experience with it.
I can’t explain it, but the appeal of it is really strong to me, that it integrates itself into your existing markup, and allows the developer to still get to work with code and exercise control while the client may benefit from the admin panel. I’d really like to give it a shot so I’m hoping someone else may either commend it or not, or offer some insight. I’m unsure on the prevalence of this CMS in the web circle. I know it’s hard to overcome the more mainstream frameworks.
Anyway thanks your time and input, and for participating.
Hey Emgo,
I’ve heard of and looked at Perch a little bit, but I’ve never done anything with it. I do know that you should be somewhat skeptical of CMSs that make claims like that. When I was looking for a CMS the first time, I found one that made a similar claim, that it was super easy to use, you just plugged in a couple magical things, and it worked… and it wasn’t very good (in my opinion; there are people who love it). Insufficient documentation was the main problem, so I’d really recommend you take a look at their docs before starting out on a project with it.
If you think the docs look OK, then try it out! Don’t expect instant, magical success, but if the CMS is OK and you aren’t a brand new programmer, you shouldn’t have too much trouble.
I ended up going with WordPress for my first CMS, and there is a reason it’s so popular (although, I don’t think it deserves to be as popular as it is). WP has weird/tricky/annoying/stupid stuff you’ll have to get around sometimes, but it isn’t too hard to build for and it does do a lot.
I don’t recommend WordPress very much though, the whole thing just sort of feels bloated and like it’s trying to accomplish everything to me. But y’know, there are people who love it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Depending on how complex your project is, Rails might be a good thing to use. I took the RoR course on Codecademy and was & still am really impressed by how easy it is compared to what I had worked with before, WordPress. Building your own CMS from scratch has it’s advantages, since you know how much more of it works, and you’re writing your own functions (except for that, in Ruby, they’re called methods), so you know what you need to use to get the output you want 
Just some thoughts, let me know if you have any questions about my post