Features

What do you get in Perch Runway?

To make you (and your clients) happy

Perch Runway is a CMS built for people who create websites for their clients. Our aim is to help you quickly build top-class websites, and to provide an experience for clients that helps them go about their business efficiently. Think of us as your toolkit for creating content-driven sites.

Here are some highlights from our features that we are really proud of. You can also take a look around our documentation for specifics - or get in touch and ask us a question.

Making Your Site Fast

Speed as a Priority

The fastest sites have speed considered right through the stack, Runway has been built to be as fast as possible. We’ll avoid adding features if they are likely to harm performance.

CDN Support

Any Resource Bucket can be configured to use a CDN, helping make your assets load more quickly.

Varnish Support

In Perch Runway you will find the ability to work with Varnish Cache, automatically purging pages from the cache when edits happen.

Designers and Developers

No theme to wrestle with

Runway has no themes or inbuilt mark-up. Develop your own starting points, or start from scratch. You’ll never have to overrule our decisions first.

Your Templates become the editing UI

Build a template for some content, and the template tags become the editing UI in the Control Panel. No need to create forms and editing screens - Perch Runway handles that for you.

Edit any type of text content

As all of your markup is up to you, Runway doesn’t care whether you are creating HTML, XML, JSON or any other text format. Create the content you need, in the format you want.

Custom Fields Everywhere

Add fields to represent any content, and be sure that your editors always know what to enter by adding custom help text.

Create Site Navigation and Breadcrumbs

Perch Runway offers flexible ways to create site navigation, using the same template language used everywhere.

Plays nicely with your workflow and tools

Use Runway with your existing front-end tool chain. We fit in with the way you want to work rather than imposing a new workflow.

Clients and Content Editors

Put content where they expect it

With Runway you won’t need to create detailed explanations about adding content to a certain channel or category in order for it to appear somewhere on the site. You can tailor the editing experience so the content appears in the CMS in a way that relates to their model of the content.

Customised help text throughout

Runway has a number of ways to add help information as you build the editing UI. This reduces the need for content editors to refer back to documentation, and gives them confidence when editing.

Undo, Drafts and Preview

Give your content editors confidence to create new content. They can create changes as a draft and preview how they look. Undo allows them to back out of a change if needed.

White labelled Control Panel

You can remove Perch branding from the Control Panel, rename the perch folder and even add your own UI customizations.

Automated backup and restore

In Perch Runway you can set up a scheduled database backup to any cloud storage bucket - or even Dropbox.

For your applications and data

Powerful Structured Content Collections

Not all site content is a page. Larger sites have content stores that need to be reused, related to each other and displayed in different ways. Collections gives you powerful tools to do that.

Content Relationships

Content Relationships between Collections is a powerful way to develop complex content structures in a way that remains really simple to edit. Power for developers. Simplicity for editors.

Cloud Storage

Perch Runway supports Amazon S3 and Rackspace CloudFiles. You can set up a resource bucket on these services and files will be seamlessly stored there. Coupled with a CDN this allows you to serve assets and images from the cloud.

Front Controller and URL Routing

Perch Runway has a front controller pattern and an elegant system of URL routing, making it easy to structure your site just the way you want it.

Powerful API and ways to extend Runway

There are a number of ways to extend the functionality of Perch Runway using our API. Your custom applications can fit right into the Control Panel offering a seamless experience.

Features to rely on

Send Forms and Store Data

Add forms to your site and choose to email the data or store it for download as CSV.

Full ecommerce

Sell anything from ebooks to physical items with our amazing Shop Addon.