Hey there, I'm Jonathan, a freelance digital consultant, specialising in UX/UI Design.

I help companies design and develop beautifully simple user interfaces. I work with a huge variety of clients including companies like, Smith & Nephew, KLM, Durex and the National Aids trust.

Free Minimal Responsive Theme for Perch CMS (Part 1)

Posted By Jonathan Clift on 09 July 2014

Perch CMS is a wonderfully simple Content Management System that I use frequently on lots of the websites I develop. It doesn't get in the way of the way you want to code and can be added to existing websites in no time at all. I want to tell people a little more about perch and a theme template I'm creating for it.

Perch CMS

Perch CMS Overview

Perch is a PHP based Content Management System which was built with web designers and developers in mind. What's great about Perch is that it puts your markup first, rather than forcing you to develop in a way that fits their framework. This also makes it really easy to add Perch to sites that might already be up and running. By adding a simple Perch Content tag will transform your website into editable sections where required. The other thing I really like about Perch is that it's a focussed Content Management System. What I mean by that is that unlike WordPress, its not bloated with unused functionality and is heavily focussed on making it as easy as possible for the end user to keep their website up to date. It's then down to you as the developer to set things up nicely to make it even easier for your users to maintain their sites. It's incredibly quick working with perch and their extensive and helpful documentation makes it very easy to get up and running in now time. Whilst it's mainly focussed at Web Designers or Developers, theres no reason why you could work with it even if you didn't have any web designer/developer experience. This brings me to the second part of this post, my minimal theme for Perch.

Free Minimal Responsive Theme for Perch CMS

At the moment there isn't really theme functionality built into Perch and there are reasons for that, which is absolutely fine. However, I thought it might be handy for people who need a little more help, to create a minimal Perch Template/Theme that they can use to get started on their own website. So here is the design for the theme:

Minimal Responsive Theme for Perch CMS

This is just part 1, the next part of this post I'll be documenting all the work I've done to code this theme into the Perch framework. Check back soon to see the results. Ready for Part 2?