RIGHT BAD CODE

Features are not everything, often something simple and specific can be much better at completing a task than something complex. In this little post i am going to look at some of the new tiny CMSs which are around, what my ideal feature list is and some systems that may fit the bill.

So a Micro CMS does what is says on the tin, its a smaller simpler way to manage content and functionality on simple websites. Allowing the user to keep the site up to date (woop) as well as aiding in the development of the site itself.

This topic is quite close to my heart as its something i have been playing with on and off for around a year now. Building a lightweight simple CMS for the simple small sites i find myself building. Typically the sites consists of a number of pages of content and a contact form or two… how hard can it be?

So, lets take a step back for a moment and look at what functionality would be nice in a little CMS.

1: Flexibility:

Right at the top of the list there is flexibility. Whether i need to add a team profile, or a simple news system the ability to create groups of structured content is essential. 

2: User Experience 

What use is a CMS no one is interested in using? The UX for any simple CMS must be just as simple. While this seems straight forward at first glance both common metaphors (backend and frontend) have issues. For example, for the backend editing systems knowing what is editable on the site at a glance or how exactly to find it to edit is difficult, for a front end system maintaining consistent context is complex. Neither is perfect :(

3: Speed

One of the reasons to go for simple systems is for the speed advantage! With simplicity comes the speed, lowering costs, making your site more peppy and putting less strain on the inter-tubes. Though, page speed is not the only speed. A good CMS can aid me in building out a website by taking away some of the dull duplication of common elements..

So now we know what we want? What options are there out there? Well one option i spent this morning investigating is the little but powerful perch CMS.

Perch CMS is from the talented folk over at edgeofmyseat, it aims to fulfil most of the goals above and provide a means to build small easy to edit websites. A goal in which is it very accomplished though not without its issues.

Perch is very fast to work with, while at first i was dubious of the straight PHP syntax (normally preferring more abstract <tags />) it grew on me. Part of this was that coda (my text editor of choice) did a better job highlighting the PHP areas than it would other XML compliant tags. I also like how perch sits separately to the rest of the site. It runs in its own space and does not take over which is very cool indeed.

Going back to our list of features lets look at perch in these areas. For flexibility perch has it covered. Any form of structure content is quickly consumed and displayed. For my use i would prefer to have the type of content defined in the perch_content() tag (rather than in the UI and held in the database) as it make using SVN to manage to a site build a lot easier. Perch allows you to build as many data types as you need each within a content element. Its very flexible and the automatically generated UI is very easy to use. A particular feature which impressed was the was you could feed instructions into the UI from the templates simple yet oooo so useful!

The user experience of perch is fantastically thought out, i dropped drew (one of the developers) an email to ask about the front end editing and received back a well reasoned and interesting explanation as to why they feel front end editing is flawed. While i may not agree entirely that front end editing is always bad i have to agree that it has its faults but thats more of a discussion for another day.

The support from drew over twitter and their support forum was excellent and really encouraging. Its great to know that if i get stuck there is a community out there willing to help! 

The final area which we had on our list was speed. Perch has that covered! while i did not have any bench marking enabled on the system from discussions with drew in the past i know speed is a focus of the system.

Speed of another kind is where i feel perch dropped the ball a bit. As part of a CMS i expect to be able to use inbuilt functions to do common tasks. Such as building contact forms and other types of data gathering forms. Currently perch does not have any inbuilt form generators. While its easy to add a third party system for me this does detract from how useful perch is. For many sites a form of one description or another is the ultimate call to action. For even a simple form builder to be missing even after reaching version 1.5 i feel to be a glaring omission which sadly precludes me from using perch on many client sites (just now). I am looking into ways of adding the contact form building to perch, for my own little CMS project i developed a simple form building library. I am looking now to see if its possible to implement this into perch using the API as a plug-in. If you have been using perch and have a form builder you like, please drop me a comment with a link.