‘Really little’ CMS Perch hits 2.0

'Really little' content management system Perch has just received a major update. According to co-creator Drew McLellan, Perch is "ideally suited [to] when you just need straightforward content management without lots of hassle". He told .net it enables you to make content editable, so you can hand it over to a client "knowing they won't need a lot of training and they won't muck the site up". However, Perch had initially been designed with small websites in mind, and the latest update responds to developer feedback, opening up the CMS to larger projects, but still keeping everything simple.

In the new release, management of pages and navigation, something that was previously an add-on, is integrated directly into Perch. "Combined with a new system of roles and permissions, you can optionally give your client the ability to add new pages, reorganise navigation and content with drag-and-drop and so on," said McLellan. "You can also do things like create groups of users who can only edit certain parts of the site."

He added that Perch 2 also has a redesigned user interface that "streamlines workflow and ensures that with a growing site the control panel continues to be responsive and easy to navigate," and said multiple-item content regions can now be "switched from their traditional easy edit-all-on-one-page mode, to a list-and-detail edit mode to manage more items".

Perch 2 is a paid upgrade, with a special offer (£15/€20/$25) until the end of July. McLellan said a lot of work had gone into making the upgrade process as easy as possible; post-purchase, you install a fresh copy of Perch 2, and use an Upgrade add-on to import content in a nice graphical way. "For most sites, that should handle everything and upgrading should only take a few minutes."