Webflow and Perch CMS

Hi - I’m one of the Perch founders, spotted this thread due to people clicking through to our site.

I’d be really interested in what a Webflow and Perch workflow looks like. It’s hard for us to become fluent enough in all the different tools people use to be able to provide advice and tutorials so it’s great when we see people who know the tool writing about it.

Anyway, I hope you don’t mind me hopping onto the thread - always happy to answer any questions about Perch and I look forward to reading your tutorial!

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Hi Rachel, thanks for stopping by, you’re more then welcome here :slight_smile: I love Perch and hope I can do it justice with my write-up.

I tried using Perch but found it way to confusing to integrate into the site. But, then I tried cloudcannon and OMG I am in love. Its amazing. And the best part is I can class in webflow itself and just upload to cloudcannon directly and its ready to go!

Are there more people out there using cloudcannon? Whats your comments about the system? Any bugs, or issues or concerns you have had? What do you like about it?

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Hi Rachel,

Nice to see you chime in :wink: While I have the ear of one of the founders of a CMS I’ll throw my 2 cents in.

I love, love, love what the founders at Couch have done. Taken a REAL WORLD example site, complete with a homepage, blog/news section, portfolio section, etc & did a complete walk-through (while explaining the system along the way) of how to take a plain CSS/HTML build & turn it into a functioning content managed website.

Granted, the tutorial & site they have used looks a bit dated, but I feel like after reading through I have a very solid grasp on how to port a basic brochure type of site with a blog/news section (and even pull some of the data from the blog section back into the homepage.)

I’m new to development in general, so reading through documentation about “templates”, “tags”, “PHP includes”, etc alone can seem rather daunting & a little tough to wrap my head around. Couch is no different, they have a dedicated section that contains all the usual dry & vague CMS lingo noted above. The only difference is their walk-through actually made me understand how to put it all to use.

I noticed you guys seem to offer a bit more in terms of documentation & guidance than the majority of content management systems but you may think about doing a complete walk-through similar to how the folks at Couch have done.

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I’m also in the ‘show me how to use it’ camp. I’ve recently completed a site with CouchCMS and found the tutorial very useful (although it could stand for improvements).

Most CMSs that I’ve researched offer very little in the way of practical tutorials and that’s a shame since most could really grow their base with the right lessons.

I don’t know, I have to disagree here. Most major CMS platforms have excellent tutorials and amazing documentation detailing all of the things you can do with them. In addition they all offer outstanding support. It requires a little reading, a little effort and less hand holding.

Surreal CMS Docs
Perch CMS Support & Docs + Tutorial Videos
Ghost Platform Docs, Forums and Support
Statamic Learning Resources

We have a complete walkthrough in our video tutorial.

It takes you right through the process of building a site - going from static files. Step by step as a video with transcripts too. I’ve recently just updated all of the video.

http://docs.grabaperch.com/video/tutorials/swift/

The completed, built code and template files are all available on GitHub and the site you build is one of our demo sites - Swift Migrations - if you want to take a look at it.

We also have a solutions section that takes specific scenarios and explains them as well as some more standalone video tutorials - for example this one I recorded last week to show how a slightly more complex list/detail setup might be built using our new Categories functionality.

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thanks for the help! I am very interested on this.

Hey Rachel, that’s a great list of video tutorials. It might just get me to try out perch actually. I keep coming across your guy’s site and have been tempted for a while now. I think I read an article written by you about the drinking problem in the industry. Great article! Maybe We’ll drink less with easier CMS options like yours!
Cheers! ( oh, and I mean that in the european sense of the word as in, ‘thank you’, not in the American sense that means, let’s drink! :wink: )

Hi Kirk & Mogeek

I agree, I’ve looked and tried a whole load of CMSs, and for me (a designer - not a coder) Couch is brilliant. I now prototype in Webflow, get the majority of all page designs, javascript and navigation sorted, and then move over to Couch and retrofit the CMS.

Their tutorials could be a little clearer, there is an assumption of a degree of knowledge and understanding, but after persevering and asking a few questions it all fell into place.

I did look at Perch and was toying with that, but opted for Couch, can’t remember why now - they look very similar. It was probably more about the retrofitting capabilities that I was interested in, A CMS working with my code straight from webflow was what I needed and I think Couch make more of that than Perch where retrofitting is mentioned rather than leading with it. I know I searched for a retrofitted CMS. (Rachel - maybe you should make more of the retrofitting on the site…)

It’s good that Couch is Open Source, so you can try it out properly, and if you don’t want their badge you pay a small fee so it is white labelled.

I recommend it.

I’m going to try Perch right now, since it has the concept of the most apreciated functionality from Business Catalyst: “webapps”. I love the idea of “Custom Fields” everywhere. Thanks jwburkhard !!

Hey, can you start a new thread explaining classing in webflow for cloudcannon?? Really interested in this!

I will when I have time mate!
But for starters cloudcannon lets you select items you want to be ‘editable’ in its own CMS!

I figured it out. Trouble is it seems theres no way to use cloudcannon for free in that way and I’m not paying another monthly subscription