Managing Content

Perch Runway is a website content management system that solves a classic problem many other systems face. Traditionally, there’s a couple of ways different CMSs handle managing content for pages. Let me show you how those work in Perch Runway.

Firstly, there’s the direct manipulation approach, where you find the page within your site structure and click through to add your content to the page. This is very straightforward and great for less technical users, and it’s the perfect way to edit microcopy, marketing text and unique content that isn’t reused in multiple places around your site.

There’s never the need to ask “how do I edit the copy on the About page” because it’s right there on the About page. Perfectly simple.

Where this approach isn’t so useful is when you have large volumes of content. No one wants to be adding a page for every news story, as before long you’re doing the work of managing the content rather than the software.

For those situations, you need a different approach where you add content to a big bucket, and have the system deal with surfacing it at various places in the website. In Perch Runway, we call those big buckets Collections.

Collections are designed to gather and organise large sets of content which the website can then draw on to build up pages. Here we have collections of Books and Authors, with a relationship between the two so that authors can be assigned to the books they’ve written. This dynamic approach enables us to show listings of books, or authors, books by a given author and so on.

This is useful for sites with high volumes of content, but of course, the abstraction adds complexity when compared to the direct manipulation approach.

Many CMSs force you down one path or the other, which puts you at a disadvantage if, like most sites, you have a mix of the two types of content.

Perch Runway identifies and designs for this problem by offering both styles of content management - direct manipulation where it makes sense for small on-page content, and Collections to manage large sets.

And so the user doesn’t need to think too hard about what type of content they’re editing, we provide easy methods for you to customise the interface to make sure the content is right where the they expect to find it.