
Perch: a really little CMS - Tomte
https://grabaperch.com/
======
vorpalhex
There's a ton of these little php CMSs but it feels like inheritating the
entire attack surface of LAMP or even just an apache + php stack is insane
these days.

Use a static site generator. Maybe have a nice UI around it. Publish the whole
thing to S3 or whatever CDN fronted storage solution you like. Almost no
attack surface, mindlessly easy, very cheap.

~~~
Tomte
> Maybe have a nice UI around it.

I only know about Lektor and MovableType. Arte there more SSGs with some kind
of web interface to write and edit posts?

~~~
marc_io
Use Stackbit to create your combo of SSG, Theme and CMS.
[https://www.stackbit.com/](https://www.stackbit.com/)

~~~
loganwedwards
Stackbit really is a great product! I was able to throw up a marketing site
for my family's rental property in a few hours for some non-technical people
to manage.

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benfrain
“It’s all about the comments”. All these static site generators are fine but
they can’t deal with comments. Then you have to add a commenting system from a
3rd party, at which point you may well wish you’d just gone with a PHP/DB
solution from the beginning

~~~
winrid
Well I just launched fastcomments.com which you could use :p

~~~
kohtatsu
[https://fastcomments.com/](https://fastcomments.com/)

I appreciate the pricing~

~~~
wtmt
It isn’t clear to me what the individual tier allows, except for the pageview
restriction. There is no FAQ or Support link on the homepage. Is it one domain
where all sub domains can have comments enabled? Or is it one subdomain in a
domain? Or is it all (disparate) domains owned by an individual?

~~~
winrid
Yeah right now you have to have an account, then you have direct access to
customer support via the UI.

A FAQ page I should put together, that's correct.

Your questions:

1\. The tiers differ in pageview restrictions and developer support access.
The highest tier provides migration support for the platforms that don't have
automated migrations today (you can import from Disqus, Commento, and a couple
others).

2\. Right now domains are unlimited and validated at TLD. When you sign up
just enter the sites you want to use like.com, this.org. For example, I dog-
feed it on my blog at blog.winricklabs.com, but I only have winricklabs.com on
my account.

~~~
Cephalopterus
Are there any plans to add a free tier without support or migration for say,
less than 100k views a month? The pricing seems pretty neat if you're closer
to the limit of the pricing ie one million page views but if you're at the
other end of the spectrum then it's significantly better to go with a free
solution

~~~
winrid
Don't want to support a bunch of free customers at the moment. Maybe later.

~~~
kohtatsu
I think it's a good call.

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i_like_robots
I used to use Perch regularly for the small sites I was building 8-10 years
ago. It fit perfectly into my workflow when I was running a one person shop:
1. Design in Photoshop 2. Build the static HTML and CSS 3. Integrate the CMS
and deploy. Perch always made the final step so easy and clients liked it, so
I was very grateful for it.

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tomduncalf
This looks like it’s based around the “page” paradigm, which is fine for some
sites, but for many types of sites I’ve found that you often want to manage
entities with a set of custom fields instead of full pages, then compose the
pages from combinations of these entities.

I’ve been pretty pleased with Cockpit CMS (getcockpit.com) for these kinds of
sites. It’s a headless CMS similar to something like Prismic or Contentful,
but it’s self-hosted and open source. It uses PHP and SQLite (which means it’s
easy to host wherever) and the code is fairly easy to understand if you do
want to make changes.

The way I’ve been working with it is using Cockpit to manage the content,
which is then consumed by a React site via Cockpit’s API. In order to decouple
the CMS and the actual site (and to provide security, versioning and fast page
loads), I use react-static (also highly recommended!) to create a static
HTML/JS site - so the workflow is: edit content in Cockpit, then trigger a
build (I use Netlify for this) which generates a static version of the site
which you can then preview and publish easily - it’s just HTML and JS files.

You could use e.g. Drupal or Wordpress to do this with the right plugins, but
I’ve found the level of complexity there (both from a developer point of view,
and for end users especially in the case of Drupal) too high for simple
freelance projects. Cockpit strikes a good balance of flexible yet easy to
understand and customise for me - I did also investigate some options such as
Netlify CMS, but at the time it didn't seem flexible enough to meet my
requirements, this may have changed!

~~~
lucasverra
hi there, thanks for sharing. How is the workflow for a preview feature ?
Meaning, i'm editing content, i kinda want to see what it will look like IF
published. Should i wait for an entire build of (assume 30 to 100) pages just
to see this new/updated one ?

~~~
tomduncalf
Ah, yes unfortunately you do need to wait for a build in the way it’s
currently set up. The largest site I’ve done is probably in the 50-100 page
region and that does take 2-3 mins to preview. One option might be to run
react-static in dev server mode on a server to generate the preview, this will
generate the site on the fly rather than in advance (as it’s intended for
development use with hot reloading etc) - I’m thinking of trying this on my
current project.

~~~
lucasverra
contentfull and gatsby are kinda tacking this exact preview issue. But telling
a non tech editor to wait for several minute for a preview is a big NONO from
my side.

Sadly contentful is not free in a nice free tier

(0): [https://www.contentful.com/blog/2019/04/24/content-
preview-f...](https://www.contentful.com/blog/2019/04/24/content-preview-for-
your-contentful-gatsby-site-with-nextjs/)

~~~
tomduncalf
Yeah, it does depend on your requirements of course, the sites I’ve used it
for are freelance sites for small companies for whom waiting a minute or two
isn’t a big problem. Should also note that I don’t think Cockpit has
versioning or draft states so probably not suitable for a “big” site with lots
of editors etc.

Like I say, the dev server route may be a way to make this more dynamic.
Another possibility is that it seems like react-static can now do incremental
builds for only a subset of routes, so you could just republish a given route
I’d it’s easy to map from CMS entity to affected route(s).

One other thing to keep in mind is that for some categories of site, moving
away from the “managing pages” CMS model to the “managing content models”
often makes the site much easier to manage (e.g. you can’t break the layout by
editing the wrong thing in a wysiwyg editor) so there may be less need for
frequent previewing.

But I agree, not a solved problem yet. Running the preview on the dev server
is the best I can think of for now. You can imagine some kind of site-aware
CMS that understood how entities mapped to components and could show inline
previews in a React Storybook kind of style, that could be neat!

~~~
tomduncalf
For the record, I did go with the route of running react-static in dev mode on
the server for preview (using Phusion Passenger to run it, as this was set up
on the server, which required an app.js file to start the server:
[https://gist.github.com/tomduncalf/00070fecb68a6cf35c0102c75...](https://gist.github.com/tomduncalf/00070fecb68a6cf35c0102c75f166a8a)).
Seems to work really well.

I've got another simple server at "/restart" running which touches
"tmp/restart.txt" when hit which forces Phusion Passenger to restart the dev
server, which forces it load the content again. Takes like 10-15 seconds to be
ready to preview, client is very happy compared to the old setup which
required a few mins of building to preview!

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jitl
I used Perch for freelance web development back in ‘10 and it was great - just
the features I needed, and simple enough to share with clients. Well worth the
price.

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blowski
The “elephant in the room” I couldn’t find answered on the site: if I’m going
to use a PHP CMS, why would I not use WordPress or Drupal? They both have an
enormous community of developers, plugins, documentation, and users. At the
moment, this feels like yet another PHP CMS that will become abandonware
within months.

~~~
ChrisLTD
Perch has been around for a decade. You never know when or if something will
become abandonware, but Perch isn’t something new.

~~~
tylerchilds
Just a shoutout to Rachel Andrew, the co-founder of Perch, member of the CSSWG
and imo the Champion of CSS Grid.

[https://rachelandrew.co.uk/](https://rachelandrew.co.uk/)

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deminature
Seems great, but gating the demo behind an email signup seems like it would
bounce a lot of potential customers. It certainly killed my interest in
looking at the demo.

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Nickersf
I love it. Use it for client work to this day.

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throwawaynothx
considering how long it took to load the site its something I would never use

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kerabatsos
It's cool, but I believe this has been posted a few times?

[https://imgur.com/a/xHNzuvA](https://imgur.com/a/xHNzuvA)

~~~
hombre_fatal
HN doesn't operate on a one-submission-per-topic-forever policy. There are
different people online every day who might not have seen the submissions from
2009 or half a year ago, each with a whopping 2 points.

If people think it's an interesting submission, they'll upvote it.

