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How do I know if perch is right for my website?
Hello Perch Dev team,
I was looking into using your cms system but I had a few question before I got started.
The website that is being created needs to have the following features -
blog
- online store - with the ability to sell online courses to members who buy the rights.
- mailing lists - other than mail chimp if I don't choose to go with them.
- Limitations of the perch system - will I have problems when trying to scale or if I need particular functionality does plugins need to be paid for to be created. Basically what I'm asking for is there support I can seek from the Perch Devs, if I need to develop new features or who to go to when these features need to be developed.
I absolutely love the idea of the Perch cms building around the website rather then the otherway around.
Hope this will be the first of many posts :D
Lee.
We have the free Shop app that adds that functionality.
We try to make it easy to integrate with MailChimp, but there's no reason you couldn't use another service. Was there one in particular you were looking at? What level of integration do you need?
Scaling to traffic is no issue - Perch is very fast and efficient. Scaling to large amounts of content would be catered for further down the line by upgrading to Perch Runway if needed. Scaling a wall? Turn the camera 90 degrees like Batman.
Our first party plugins are free and if you want to create your own you don't need to pay us in order to do that.
If you wanted to hire us to develop new functionality, that's sometimes an option. We mostly only accept projects that would benefit the wider user base. https://grabaperch.com/consultancy
Hi Drew,
Thanks for the awesome comprehensive reply!
Would you recommend a version of Perch I should use for my user case?
Also how does the perch cms system deal with making a new field in which people can put in their content and if I was to remove that field would I have to go into the database and delete that field's data? or will it do it automatically?
I just want to know if I do a full website overhaul and some datasets aren't used anymore, what happens to them?
Cheers,
Lee.
If you like the idea of adding a CMS into an existing site, that's the sweet spot for Perch. Runway is great for building a new site around a CMS.
The content will be removed automatically.
You can just click Delete to delete them.
I'll purchase my copy of perch asap!
With the "The content will be removed automatically."
What if I want to move content from one part of a page to another, will it automatically delete it?
For instance with a blog dataset, if I have a Quote and want to remove it and put it back in if I change my mind. Will all this data be gone from the dataset?
Are you describing wordpress's versioning system? Ie does Perch save previous states of the content? No. It's gone. There is a feature which is called "shared content" for persistent data across pages.
Blog is a free add-on so isn't as comprehensive as Perch itself. Perch versions content for a configurable number of steps (the default is 20 I think), so if you make a change you don't like you can just click Undo.